


Home Is Where The Hurt Is

by kaboomslang



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Fluff and Angst, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, POV Chirrut Îmwe, Separation, but it's ok, everyone cries, i'm sorry chirrut, in my day we called this whump, like... so much hurt and hopefully enough comfort to make up for it, reconcilliation, spiritassassin 2017 exchange
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-03
Updated: 2017-04-09
Packaged: 2018-10-14 14:00:39
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 6
Words: 30,908
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10537959
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kaboomslang/pseuds/kaboomslang
Summary: The question is not what Chirrut did, but what he should have done. Alone and wracked with guilt, he lets his city take pound after pound of flesh, not sure if he wants Baze to turn up before there's nothing left to give.Baze turns up.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ch8rles](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ch8rles/gifts).



> My explanation is simply that I saw Logan before I started writing and the grimness just bled through. I hope you enjoy it, and I hope I did the prompt justice!
> 
> The prompt was: "baze and chirrut (age ~25) getting back together after separating for ~5 years and they're like, "oh yup worst five years of my life""
> 
> I'd like to give immense thanks to [chuchisushi](https://archiveofourown.org/users/chuchisushi/pseuds/chuchisushi) for giving me some much needed help and some truly horrible ideas, to [evocates](https://archiveofourown.org/users/evocates/pseuds/evocates) for cheerleading, and to [GreyMichaela](https://archiveofourown.org/users/GreyMichaela/pseuds/GreyMichaela) for coming to my rescue and giving me even more ideas, less horrible this time. Also for being a wonderful beta who I love to make cry

_forget my name cause i’m a call away_

_storing shame inside my skinny frame_

_know you hate when you don’t get your way_

_and isn’t that something?_

_barefoot on the train tracks_

_sunburn on my crooked back_

_little poems about my brittle bones_

_scream for help and i hide alone_

**_-nothing,nowhere: eastern highways_ **

 

 

Dragging Baze from the wreckage and fleeing the hopeless battle took a gargantuan effort, made worse by Baze’s writhing and hoarse screams, shredding into Chirrut’s ribs. He was always dragging Baze along with him, into fun, into adventures, into love, but never had he been met with such resistance, if any at all. They went together. This pulling apart, this frantic fight on Baze’s part to separate from him was a layer of fresh agony over the carnage their lives had become in an instant, meteoric strike of death and fire. During evening prayer, they had been on _guard duty—_

Chirrut heard a choked sob burst forth from his own throat and clenched his teeth to keep the bile churning inside him, where it belonged. He couldn’t think, couldn’t plan, could do nothing but lock his arms and haul Baze further away from their home. Baze was the thinker between them, and he was out of his mind. Rioters and terrified pilgrims grasped at their robes as if they saw past Baze’s frothing, insane fury and Chirrut’s blood-drenched face, saw them for the beacons of protection and peace they should have been.

He threw off their hands, gasping, _“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, just run,”_ because they were barely men themselves, now refugees lost in their own city and blinded by blood. Any being now less worthy of their trust and respect than Chirrut Îmwe, he hoped never to meet.

“We have to go back!” Baze yelled, his voice ruined by sinewy, pleading grief and clogging smoke, but Chirrut heaved him forward, wishing he had a thousand arms to bind him with despite the fact that Baze had never accepted even a single hand. He was always the one extending olive branches, rooted deep as he is in the temple’s forest. As he _was_.

Then the shattered end of Baze’s staff caught Chirrut’s leg in their grappling, ripping a fork of agony along his thigh and he grunted in shock, felt the muscle give and slumped into Baze’s side.

Another facet of the temple crumbling to the ground before their eyes. He felt a cancerous spread of hatred for himself, because he could not be yet another thing to fall on Baze’s shoulders which already carried so much. He could not be the festering straw to break that back, not now, not after this, because he knew inside that Baze may never pull himself free of what happened that day. It may kill him yet, finish what it meant to start before Chirrut stole him away from the losing fight, one more selfish act in a life that is abundantly full of them.

“No, no no, Chirrut don’t, not you, not now—where do we go?!”

Baze whirled around, a maddened dervish with black and red wings. “We have to help them! But your leg, we need—help.” Baze’s voice broke for the first time in years but it was a grate for a forest fire, a barrier so ineffective to the fury within him that Chirrut flinched from the heat, even as he tried to think through the maelstrom, the screaming crater in his leg, the mists of blood as people around them were vaporised in hissing light beams from above.

“The warrens—” He clutched at Baze’s ragged sleeve. “Deep in the slums, now.”

Baze snarled, thunder billowing down his face but he grabbed first both their staffs, then Chirrut, and ran.

Explosions repeatedly beat them into the ground as they tried to outrun the encroaching shadow of the destroyer fleet. Chirrut’s breath was being torn from his lungs in whistling gusts as his jagged wound stretched and streamed dark torrents from the movement, but they staggered into the burnt forest of alleyways without any more hindrance. The slums were too far from the temple’s lofty, sunlit arches, silk-green gardens and priceless kyber to be of any concern to the Empire.

Fitting, Chirrut thought bitterly, that they should flee here, rats deserting a sinking ship. But NiJedha had no oceans, and the only fate for rats escaping a spiralling ship was to plummet to a crushing death.

“Where Chirrut, fucking _damn_ you, where now?”

Baze had lost the beastly edge to his anger, and all that remained was an icy focus Chirrut knew well. No one in the temple save him had ever dared to challenge Baze Malbus when his ire was stoked, usually because the only things that provoked it were grievous threats to their home, his loved ones, the _children_ , and those times required no challenging. Chirrut though, he had made it his life’s work to be a thorn in the side of his world, of which Baze made up a larger part than either of them would have imagined. No mood of Baze’s was too distant a peak to summit.

But Baze was more than justified to his rage now, and Chirrut wanted nothing less than to needle him over it. The web of energy that usually spun silvery, holo-blue between their souls was ebbing, fraying to grey but he fought the erosion with grasping touches to Baze’s arm, tried frantic to sew them back together before it was too late.

Chirrut pushed a shuddering hand against the soaked leg of his trousers to stifle his panic, and screamed at the spike of pain. Ramshackle buildings, spidery with broken beams and scorched curtains clutched around them as the world pitched, but he managed to say, “East, until the bootleggers’, then underground.”

Another blast knocked them sideways, more deafening than all that had come before. Chirrut clenched his jaw until it ached as they scrambled further into the dank passages, these caves darker and more menacing than any of the kyber tombs. He had prayed never to come back here, nursed it as a secret shame grown from wondering if he had become a Guardian for the wrong reasons. The Whills were not to be a place of escape from one’s old life.

Meeting Baze had convinced him of that, because then his new life was not an escape, simply another cage, a different one gilded in soft light, one he had walked into willingly before swallowing the key. One he would never leave of his own volition.

He dragged himself back from the oil-slick lake of unconsciousness, focused on the rasp of Baze’s breathing and looked into his face, saw the red handprint in his own blood smeared over those beloved features, and doubled over to vomit.

Baze swore and pulled him harshly from the path of a charging pair of terrified Adarians. Scum puddles and the whites of Baze’s upturned, wild eyes were lit suddenly by a thousand sparks, a swarm of blazing fireflies as the sky burned the heavens to pieces and fired sunlight through the gaps to roast them alive.

“That’s—that’s kyber fire,” Baze choked. Chirrut grasped his face and forced their eyes to meet, willing Baze to see him, to see where the current battle lay, but Baze was staring through him with swimming, shellshocked eyes. “They’ve taken the mines. The temple is gone. It’s gone.”

Chirrut shoved at him as they came into view of the bootleggers’ and collapsed against the manhole out front.

“It’s here,” he said, “please, Baze, we’ll be safe.”

Isn’t that what rats did, after all. Hide in the sewers.

 

With a makeshift tourniquet, bactawrap and a handful of pills from upstairs bought with the discomfiting promise of favours, Chirrut was lucid again. He watched Baze pace past the crates of supplies, the junk and old barrels, stalking the damp little shelter like a nexu guarding its kill.

He hadn’t touched Chirrut since they had stopped running, save for fixing his leg. Hadn’t even looked his way and hadn’t said a thing. Chirrut’s stomach was being ravaged and tossed by the storm of his blood, thundering through his veins in a flood of panic.

Words took an age to come to Baze sometimes, the right words, ones weighed as heavy as the responsibilities Baze took upon himself to prove he was necessary and useful. But he would always touch, even when the words would curl up and wedge themselves behind his teeth, to be pulled out in pain. Chirrut had often been impatient with him as a child, jittering out of his skin when Baze would stay silent and short-circuit in misery like this, like he was doing then, instead of telling him what was wrong.

But then Baze began reaching out when he was upset. He would grip Chirrut’s offered hand, crawl into the space left in Chirrut’s cot for him, or lean Chirrut into a wall to bury his face in his shoulder, knees bent to accommodate for their growth spurts.

He hadn’t touched Chirrut now for long, long minutes, and the silence was turning to a klaxon of alarm in Chirrut’s ears.

If Chirrut’s tempers were geysers, unpredictable and violent, then Baze’s moods, his anger was a deep well and rightly feared among so many of Jedha’s bandits, quietly waiting to be drawn to the surface. It had never taken such time to abate however, not in Chirrut’s presence.

He was right to be afraid.

Baze came prowling to stand in front of him, clutching his broken staff in one quivering hand, the other clenched by his side. The muscles in his scarlet, soot-blackened forearms twitched in bomb timer ticks. The staff’s splintered end glittered with Chirrut’s blood instead of kyber and Chirrut felt hot tears stinging his eyes. He had sullied Baze’s purest possession, one Baze had slaved over without complaint, with reverence for the honour he was chipping into his bones.

He had sullied most devoted Baze long before then, with his games and distractions and lust. To spill another Guardian’s blood was an exiling offense, but Chirrut’s leg was an accident. His assault on Baze’s heart had been wholly intentional, and coveted.

If there were a temple left to be exiled from, Chirrut would have excommunicated himself. He stared between the staff and Baze’s eyes, normally so kind and warm, now glinting with the irradiated veins of kyber that acolytes like Chirrut had been forbidden from seeing.

He reached slowly for the staff, his heart in his mouth for the ferocity in Baze’s face. “I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I’m sorry about your staff. For what we’ve lost, for everything.”

Baze stared at him with wide eyes, his gaze lingering on the grisly mess of blood sodden cloth at Chirrut’s leg, before he yanked the wood from Chirrut’s reach, and cracked the staff in half over his knee. The pieces clattered where they were hurled against the permacrete walls, and Chirrut held himself still as death.

Fluorescent buzzing filled the silence and cast sickly shadows over Baze’s hunched shoulders, quaking violently.

“What kind of a Guardian are you?” he said, low and deadly.

Confusion and dread filled Chirrut’s lungs, drowning him in the undertow of his own guilt.

“What?”

“I said, what kind of a Guardian of the Whills are you. What kind of Guardian doesn’t kill, doesn’t do their _utmost_ to defend their temple.”

Chirrut was dimly aware he was cutting into his palms with his nails, and flexed his fingers slowly. He swallowed against the molten lump in his throat but it lodged there like a burr, like a fist.

“We were outnumbered, there was no way. We’re trained to assess our battles and so I did—I had to find you,” he said, but Baze cut him off like a cleaver through rotten meat, radiating the kind of thick pressure that builds before the first monsoon of the cycle.

“Don’t. Do not make this about me. Don’t make this my fault.”

Chirrut could only stare at him, aghast. “There is no fault here, Baze, no individual is at fault for this! This is the Empire’s doing.”

Baze’s mouth opened and shut, the tiny muscle in his jaw jumping like a cricket under a magnifying glass. “We’re not talking about the same thing,” he said. “It is always someone’s fault.”

“You would say that,” Chirrut spat, because Baze was doing what he always did, fixating on minutiae and semantics and rules, worrying at it, picking at a single loose thread while the whole tapestry burned around him.

Baze lived in a world where things had to make sense, had to balance out between wrong and right, the kind of black and white thinking that came from never having to live a life of moral compromise. Normally Chirrut would have drawn him out of his invisible cloister with kisses, with laughter, with the tireless love of Baze’s quiet, ponderous company, but that was no longer an option. Things would never be normal again, and he choked down a lump in his throat as he remembered explaining bawdy jokes to Baze in the beeswax heat of summer evenings, and the way Baze’s hands would still shake when they made love.

“What is that supposed to mean?” Baze said. True fury was so foreign on his face, the way it bared both rows of crooked teeth the way his gentle smiles never did, and Chirrut felt a desperate need to kiss him, do anything to make him stop, but he too was losing his grip on his control.

“It means,” he said, “that you have never had to live a life accepting that sometimes, bad things happen to those undeserving of them. Sometimes the Force seems unkind—”

Baze laughed, and it took Chirrut a second before he parsed the sound as _cruel_. He had never known cruelty to live in Baze at all, and the thought that he had dragged it from its hiding place spilled more hot tears down his face.

“That’s your excuse!?” Baze said. “Sometimes bad things happen to good people? You’re the one who fled, Chirrut, you’re the one who didn’t help. If you hadn’t then maybe fewer _bad things_ would have happened!”

Chirrut reared back in shock. “It isn’t an excuse, I don’t need—we simply weren’t strong enough—”

“You cannot pass the blame for this. Not this time. This isn’t a stupid prank, do you hear me?”

“So you would have us martyred?” Chirrut hurled back at him. “Unable to help any further efforts in resistance?”

“For the temple, yes!” Baze cried, still planted tall before him in righteous anger, like the great unbending oak that stood in the temple’s courtyard. Chirrut couldn’t remember if it had been destroyed in the attack, and hoped against hope that it hadn’t. It reminded him too much of the man there with him, and he couldn’t bear to think of it toppled and twisted and ruined too.

But he could not hold his tongue. He had never been able to. “You are so naïve. You always have been.”

Baze faltered, the tight pinch of his eyebrows unspooling with hurt before they gathered again, more terrible than ever. “What was all that training for, Chirrut? You thought it was all for fun?” Baze scoffed, betrayal lacerating the sound. “Of course you did. Everything’s one big game to you, isn’t it.”

And it hurt. It hurt because Baze was the one who knew him best, who had crawled between his bones to rest in his soul, seen all of him from the inside. Baze knew that Chirrut had come to the Whills to find peace from his past trauma. Baze had given him that peace. Now though, it was clear to him. Chirrut had been living in peace, had been loving in peace, on borrowed time.

They shouldn’t be lashing out at each other, it was uncharted territory, this spiked void of anger between them. Chirrut didn’t know what lay within it, what pitfalls and monsters could swallow them whole. What abyss they might not be able to climb back out from. But to acknowledge the true weight of what had been stolen from them that day would surely rend his spirit further than it already had been, until he was one with the fluttering ashes of their home. He might as well have burned up with the people he deserted, for all the good he had done.

Apparently Baze felt the same way. He took Chirrut’s silence for what it was; an invitation. Agreement. Permission to take this road, to trample Chirrut himself rather than the bridge of unspeakable loss.

“What would you kill for?” He hadn’t moved from where he was towering over Chirrut like the desert colossi. His height, once a source of Chirrut’s pleasure, delighting in jumping on his broad back or squirming up his front, now a pillar of intimidation. “What would it take? Would you have killed to protect the children?”

Chirrut’s head jerked unbidden to stare at Baze, and upon seeing the stricken look there, somehow flushed high around his eyes with anger yet pale with shock, he wished he could bite through his tourniquet, because that would be less painful.

He had to clear his throat several times before he could make a sound. “What are you saying?”

“I was taking out stormtroopers, following _orders_ , when one of their kriffing _tanks_ ,” Baze kicked a metal bucket so hard against the wall that it buckled, crunching a noise that sounded like Chirrut’s kicked heart. Baze breathed slowly out through his nose and continued, “When one of their tanks hit the icehouse. Where the children were hiding. So?”

Baze leaned closer, backlit by the greenish bulb hanging from the moldy ceiling, an aura for a wrathful god meting judgement upon Chirrut’s failings, his voice soaked with ichor.

“Would you kill to have protected them? What about me?”

Wringing his hands together until the bones throbbed, Chirrut cast his eyes desperately around the room. Just last week Baze had been teaching him to knit, laughing close together in their chambers. Baze had gardened in the sun while Chirrut pretended to, they had melted down the hours until they could press muddy fingers to each others’ hungry skin in the starlight. This was a nightmare. He was barely three months into enjoying memories of his coming of age ceremony, beaming triumphantly over at Baze in the front row, flushed with pride and what he’d known in his soul was love. He was nineteen and old enough to marry, though he had pestered Baze about it for at least two years by then.

_(“We should wait until we’ve achieved the seventh duan,” Baze said, very seriously. “We can’t go somewhere nice if we’re in training, baobei.”_

_Baze had only blinked when Chirrut smacked at his knee and cackled, “You mean a honeymoon? Where are you taking me, fucking Coruscant?” He had laughed again when Baze put him in a headlock and wrestled him over.)_

Wisps of happy light, crushed slowly before his eyes by a black fist of looming reality.

“You’re the best fighter in the temple.” Here Baze stiffened and stood tall again. “Were. You _were_ the best fighter in the temple, and this is how you repay it? Not by using your talents to defend it or its faithful? I’ve always known you could be selfish, Chirrut, but I had no idea—”

“You don’t mean that,” Chirrut croaked, but it was weak and perfunctory even to his own ears. A reflexive defence, the kind he mastered with fists and weapons long before words. Baze always said what he meant. Chirrut liked to tease him that he’d taken the old adage, _if you can’t say anything nice say nothing at all,_  too far to his big heart, and it was the reason Baze was so silent and surly during formal functions. There was no room in him for deception, not like Chirrut.

Hiding his true nature from Baze had always been an exercise in futility, but in the past Chirrut had taken Baze’s acceptance of his worst traits as flattering, as an indication of Baze’s goodness. His ego had never entertained the notion that love may be conditional. That one day he may unwind so far into his own depths that Baze would give up on pulling him back.

Chirrut had just been so grateful to be loved. These slums had taught him long ago never to look a gift bantha in its biting mouth.

He grasped at what he had left, their mantras, their shared life together, tried to intone through the splitting faults in his voice, “To cut through a life force is unforgivable and should be avoided unless—”

“Unless _necessary,_ ” Baze roared, gripping at his own head so hard he dug welts into his scalp. “It is necessary now! It was necessary then!”

A long-sunken wreck of something dark and ugly was trying to float to the surface of Chirrut’s being. Struggling to his feet was impossible with his ruined leg, and Baze’s hands were rough when they pushed him back to sit against the wall. His touch lingered, shaking, and Chirrut tried to catch the fingers as they trailed briefly along his neck, igniting a helpless thrum of hope in his chest, before disappearing again. He glared up at Baze through a haze of tears and tried to bury the dark feeling. Being back here, in this part of the city, really he should have expected it. He doubted he could run from himself even if he left NiJedha’s orbit.

“You know my past,” he said, sickly proud of the steadiness in his voice, even if it was feigned. “You know why I can’t kill, Baze. I cannot be beholden to that life any more. I won’t be what they made me.”

“ _This_ is life now. Don’t you see that?” And Chirrut knew that this was not Baze speaking to him now. This was a man on the gallows, appealing to his executioner.

Baze was a rock, the kind of hardstone cliff the winds of change took millennia to shape. His abrupt acceptance of this hellish new reality speared a deeper, urgent fear in Chirrut’s chest, because there was only so much wary circling around the disaster’s edge they could do before these verbal circles turned to nooses. Chirrut was the chameleon, the cuckoo in the temple’s nest, the super-adaptive bacteria hellbent on survival, and even he was nearly mad from averting his gaze from the freshly gaping hole in their lives.

“Don’t you see?” Baze’s eyes implored him to understand, but Chirrut shook his head, trying to clear it of cruel memories, the brainwashing ones Baze knew all about and helped him fight.

_(“Hi,” said the boy, sidling right up to Chirrut’s spot pressed back against the sandy walls, worn soft and smooth by generations of hands._

_Chirrut glared at him and opened his mouth to tell the boy to fuck off, but then remembered why he had fled to the Whills, the kind of person he was trying to leave behind._

_The bosses had always smacked him around for asking too many questions anyway. He said, “What do you want?”_

_“I’m Baze,” was the reply, losing its initial confidence with the revelation that the new curiosity, the wild boy wasn’t just an animal to be talked at. “You’re Chirrut? How old are you? When’s your birthday?”_

_Chirrut had seen tourist children with balloons before. He had once huddled in a doorway and listened to a weird chanting song, smelled burning wax, but he barely had a name to call his own, let alone a birthday. He raised one shoulder reluctantly._

_Baze looked at him, his serious eyes giving nothing away. Then he swallowed and twisted his hands together a little, looking down at their bare feet, facing each other._

_“Only… it’s mine soon. Two weeks from tomorrow actually, I’ll be ten.” His big ears were going a dusky red, and Chirrut stopped fighting the way his own limbs were starting to unfurl from their clench at the sign of another’s vulnerability. Baze continued, “The Masters thought—no. I thought you might want to share birthdays. So you could start your life here with something good. I don’t mind, Chirrut. I don’t like all the attention anyway.”_

_Chirrut scoffed, because the kid talked like a grown up, but also because he was scared of the way Baze’s voice had curled around his name like a zephyr when he had only ever heard it spat like snapping whips. Baze didn’t know that Îmwe meant “son of none” in South Jedhan, or that ‘Chirrut’ was a bastardised curse. Baze didn’t know, and the lack of leering intent behind the words made them ring sweetly in his ears in a way they never had before._

_But Baze had only looked at him hopefully with his big brown eyes, shining like a baby animal’s, and Chirrut imagined what sharing something would be like, with someone with no edges to cut his hands on when he reached for his portion._

_“Okay…” he said slowly, still wary and scowling. “What do you get, on birthdays?”_

_“The kitchens make honey cashews,” said Baze, his voice tilting up with the corners of his mouth. “And we can climb the big acacia in the garden, or go to the north bazaar if one of the older brothers or sisters takes us. We’re not allowed to, normally. I’ll show you my geodes.”_

_Chirrut stared at him, lost in the whirl of soft words, painting dreamy pictures in his mind, not a drop of blood in sight._

_He finally uncurled his fists and stood up, shuffling away from the wall._

_“Alright, if you’re so desperate for a friend. Let’s go then,” he said, striding off with a confidence he didn’t fully feel given that he didn’t know where he was going, and Baze snorted, following behind and softly giving directions.)_

Throughout their arcadian tornado of a friendship he had always been the one to command, because Baze understood how forced cooperation made him lash out, rattle at the bars of the air around him. He was the most pacifying oasis in the rigors of Chirrut’s temple life, a cool spot of uncharacteristically indulgent lenience in a quicksand desert of rules and authority. That Chirrut had stayed so long in the fold of the Whills was the stuff of incredulous gossip, even despite his talents; the very fact that the Masters had drilled any routine or order into his bull head was the essence of miracles.

The Masters were gone. There was no one left to believe in miracles but them.

“The Force stayed my hand,” Chirrut said. Hurt struck a punishing blow to his innards when Baze only sneered. “It _did_ , and I have to believe that it was for a purpose.”

But Baze was pacing again with his arms folded over his stomach, as if it were aching. Chirrut’s was.

“Oh yes, the Force. How convenient that the Force’s will always happens to align with what Chirrut Îmwe wants. And I suppose it would be the Force’s will if you were more seriously injured, or if you died?”

Baze’s voice split open on this last, spilling scalding tar around their feet, gripping them to sink into its cloying depths. Chirrut was shaking. Baze had never spoken of the Force like this, judgement and contempt twin pythons coiled round his tongue to choke the air from him. “You’d just accept that?”

Chirrut buried his face in his hands, moaning lowly against the twisting blackness in his stomach. “I would have no other choice.”

“And if I died?”

Raw horror crawled up his gullet to silence him. Blank numbness filled his mind and it scratched like a buzzing electric light, drawing a swarm of flies come to feast on the corpse of his sanity. How could Baze think, hadn’t Chirrut _shown_ him—

Baze regarded him bleakly. “Right. Good to know.”

Chirrut felt his arms reach out heavy and numb, feeling through the fog of resigned despair that hung around Baze, though he wasn’t controlling them. The burnt hem of Baze’s robes twitched out of his grip as he took a step backwards, and with a sudden, blistering flare Chirrut began to seethe. At the Empire. At the injustice. At Baze’s unrelenting _stubbornness._

“Baze,” he said through clenched teeth, his grip on the old shipwreck becoming tenuous as its noxious cargo lifted it to the light of day. “You don’t understand. The Force moves through us all in different ways, you _know_ this.”

The wreck’s mast broke the surface and bile came pouring to the stale air between them in a spitting fury. “If you cannot remember such a _simple_ fucking lesson, then I too wonder what all your training was for. Was all that time spent in the archives just to hone your self-righteousness?” He hissed, “How can you forsake the Force like this?”

Baze always engaged him in debate, in brutal sparring matches that drew blood to skin’s surface and from noses. Baze always gave as good as he got, when no one else was willing to ease the gnashing _thing_ in Chirrut that always wanted to fight. Baze rose to any and all challenges he deemed worthy of him.

Now Baze was seemingly unmoved by his accusations, and sent him a withering look before turning away, striding past the sad, broken pieces of his staff to the metal rungs leading to the street above.

Baze had never turned his back on Chirrut. The sight left him bound taut and gaping in fear, like a doomed fish hauled onto a boat’s deck to die.

An aborted movement when Baze nearly turned back shot a desperately hopeful harpoon into Chirrut’s plunging heart. If he could just reel Baze back towards him he could repair this, stop the leaking gaps and convince Baze he was worth all the trouble and heartbreak he had caused them. Neither of them had sailed alone through life since the day they had met. Chirrut had done it before, but since Baze, he wouldn’t know how. Not any more.

Baze said, “Because it has forsaken us. And so have you.” He turned his head and Chirrut saw that his own bloody handprint was brown and flaking, near scrubbed away by sweat and tears, the brand of him faded to nothing like their bright woven connection in the Force.

“I’m leaving.”

The words hung between them, suspended like an axe ready to fall. It took a long moment for Chirrut to silence the roar in his ears. The sound of wind whipping past and building pressure squeezing at his eyeballs, freefalling to inevitable death. Chirrut unfroze as he hit the ground.

“N-no,” he gasped, lurching forward and crying out at the sickened buckshot ripping through his thigh.

Baze’s downturned mouth trembled and he took a deep breath, staring hard at the dripping ceiling, but Chirrut saw the visible ache in the vice grip of Baze’s control, stopping him from coming back to Chirrut’s side.

The last time Baze had stopped himself that way, he had refused to kiss Chirrut a second time, mumbling that it was safer for them both this way, because he’d never be able to part from him otherwise. Of course, he had relented. It had saved them both.

He did not relent now. The implications wrenched free the harpoon buried in Chirrut’s chest, leaving his heart beating its last on the floor between them.

“You can’t, you said you couldn’t ever,” he choked, stray tears and drips of snot spattering the dusty floor as he tried to drag himself forward, pain in his leg forgotten in comparison to the glass shards gutting him and shattering deep in his core, shaped like the word _leaving_.

Baze hissed through his teeth and held out a desperate warning hand, pleading, “Don’t Chirrut, your leg—” but Chirrut ignored him.

Baze couldn’t do this, he wouldn’t, the man he loved for his gentle, balming presence. The man who sang lullabies for the youngest of the temple. The man who would have died to protect everyone but himself, and couldn’t seem to understand why Chirrut chose life, to keep him safe.

Baze’s voice was thick and studded with nails, scraping the sound from his throat. “I don’t know how long.” His face crumpled as they stared at each other and he covered his eyes, perhaps afraid Chirrut would turn him to stone. “Chirrut, you know I’d never let you—but your _friends_ upstairs,” and his words hardened with old, uncompromising morality, raising a wall against the breaking waves of emotion. “They’ll tend to your leg. There’s bacta and food in—in the crates. I need to help our people. I know you can look out for yourself.”

Baze was climbing the ladder, and Chirrut’s outstretched hand caught his parting shot. “You’re good at that.”

The sluggish pulse of blood from Chirrut’s leg had almost ceased, but only because his heart was dead and gone.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Chirrut has a bad day.

Light was not the thing that woke Chirrut every morning, not any more. There wasn’t much of it left for him on Jedha, neither literally nor metaphorically. The northwest winds proved an effective alarm chrono, and if he concentrated hard enough, if he used his deepest focus, he could almost pretend it was the sonorous snoring of a warm chest beneath his cheek. He stopped himself from doing so too often, because his attention was a moth-eaten, rubbed out thing these days, straggly as his beard and to be rationed. It was also because the thought of that warm, absent chest only made him long to fall asleep again, which he couldn’t afford.

There was another, more sentimental reason for his choosing to eat and sleep in an old Guardian cave-cell, hundreds of feet above the ground, carved from the west face of the mesa like a tooth cavity. The first two lines of the Sunset Prayer were of no use to him now. _In darkness, cold, In light, cold._

Everything was darkness to him now, the cold its constant companion. In fact, the only way he knew when sunset came and when to drop unsteadily to his knees, blooming with bruises now from begging and praying instead of long gone sparring, was because the cold became a bigger, monstrous thing. It came every night with its great jaw distended and breathing ice into his tiny hollow, where he knelt at the cave’s mouth to praise time’s passing.

But it didn’t matter, because the rest of the prayer warmed him.

_The old sun brings no heat._

_But there is heat in breath and life._

_In life, there is the Force._

_In the Force, there is life._

_And the Force is eternal_.

He would touch his forehead to the floor for hours, count the prayer lines by pressing raw fingers to each branching rib that fought harder every starving day to split the surface tension of his skin. There was heat in breath and life. He still had both of those, despite the years spent watching, then merely feeling them slip through his fingers like the coarse sand he still called home.

He still had breath, and life, and even if heat was something only half-remembered in fading memories of mellow evenings cradled by warm arms, if he had these both, then he had the Force. All he needed was the Force, and Chirrut really did count himself a lucky man by all accounts, because the Force was eternal. He could feel it still, even if he couldn’t _really_ see it. In all likelihood it was precisely _because_ he couldn’t see it that he felt its presence humming like static in the air surrounding his every movement.

Tendrils of soft gold seeped forward from him, like melted strands of sugar, and he almost never found himself doubting his decision to follow the path they took. They wove themselves around the places he knew his hands to be, just a split second before he put them there. Whether it was to coil them into fists, or splay them to calm and soothe the injured. Sometimes they compelled him to steal food, or the occasional silken purse fat with off-world credits.

Chirrut fumbled, and tangled his fingers in the golden strings in these moments, caught by the stabbing memory of what _he_ would say if word ever got out that the Force was encouraging of crime. But then Chirrut would remember that the very notion was what wrenched them apart in the first place. It was a battle he fought inside, these moments, almost every long, wracking day, and every time it twisted those shards shaped _leaving_ deeper in his gut. He didn’t steal the food, or the money. He had his own ways of earning a living.

The winds from the northwest howled him awake that morning, rushed into his open mouth to dessicate his tongue and pull at his teeth with frozen pliers. This was yet another price he paid to thank the sunset every night. Often Chirrut sat huddled in the farthest corner of his cave and speculated on what _he_ would have to say about it. Would he admire Chirrut’s commitment and dedication to the Force, to the old ways of their old life and sacrifice of comfort even when the temple was but a husk? Surely that was selflessness.

Or maybe he would tell Chirrut to stop being a fool and just get a door already. Maybe he would care more for the way Chirrut’s smallest toes were shot through with burning, icy needles near constantly. Maybe he would withhold his lecture to try and patch the holes in Chirrut’s lungs that filled his every muttered, unanswered breath with cold.

Whenever his mind staggered off down that path, Chirrut knew it was time to sleep. He spent so much time in silent or mumbling conversation with the shade figure that it was easy to forget he was the one providing himself with the answers he really wanted.

It was more difficult every morning to raise his head from his bundles of rags, and he didn’t know if it was due to the anchors he made of his memories, or because his neck and shoulders grew weaker still. He wasn’t stupid. He was only blind to himself technically. He knew that he should cut the cords from the memories and let himself succumb to be a floating thing, suspended in the Force. He knew it was only a matter of time regardless, because his end was shambling for him quicker than he could run.

“Death is inevitable,” was the first thing he muttered into the morning wind.

Chirrut smiled weakly at the darkness and groped to the side of his thin blanket for his staff, and his flint. He gripped the wood with both hands to haul himself to a crouch, the chill biting deep into the old rip in his thigh, and fumbled along the sprawl of rough scratches in the wall to find space for the next one. He stopped angrily counting them sometime in the first year, when he began to accept that there was no one left to care how long he’d been a martyr. Now they just served to remind him that time really was passing, and some day his would end.

He felt around for the nook in the wall, avoided scouring his split knuckles on the jagged little stalagmites, and scooped up his root bag. It hung limp and empty from his fingers like a dead hand, and Chirrut sighed. The locally stationed stormtroopers had already run him off the temple steps like a stray dog the previous day for preaching too loudly, and he would have to cast his net wider if he wanted to eat anything any time soon. It took two attempts to stand, his too-big robes stiff with grime and catching round him like a mourning veil.

Chirrut steadied himself on the wall and shook his head free of cobwebs. Jedha awaited him. He set off and ignored the way the rumbling in his concave stomach blended with the Empire’s rapacious drilling deep in the mesa’s heart.

Death was a guarantee for them all that stalked with differing gaits, and so he saw no harm in taking out warm memories and worrying them ragged, prodding at them like his tongue did his field of ulcers and wobbling teeth. He relished the tangy taste in his mouth the way he did the rush of lifeblood brought on by his reminiscing.

“Need the iron anyway,” he said, then cackled at the words being whipped away like the skirts of his robes by the wind, as he edged his way along the outcrop towards the city walls.

He told himself it didn’t hurt to remember any more. He needed to train himself not to hurt, if he was to survive any longer, if he was to give any more of himself over to Jedha. So he pushed his mind the way he had once pushed his body, until it was strong enough to accept the walls of reality, and let feeble hope break against them in dissipating waves.

Some time during the second year he had stopped crying when he thought of whispered stories in hushed nests of blankets, of being the only one trusted with hurts, or of the way if felt to be kissed until he was dizzy and wanting it to last until he passed out.

He forgot the texture of red bean bao. He forgot the taste of honey cashews. He forgot the feel of grass under his soles and the sweet vines of strings and erhu dancing together. He tested himself by thinking of golden dust motes swirling in soft brown eyes, as he was shown again and again that he was worthy of love, that there was fierce life in him that others could be proud of. He didn’t cry, but it didn’t feel anything like a victory.

A rattling metal stairway had replaced the crumbling sandstone one Chirrut could remember from his youth. By the time he had come to the temple, higher Guardian monks were no longer required to abscond to the caves for periods of fasting and silent meditation, but he supposed some of the mines were still open to the air and in need of access. They had only explored the cliff caves twice as children, before deeming them too boring and cold to be worth a third scolding.

Chirrut kept his staff close and off the ground as he trudged his well worn route between the monolith chunks of masonry, peeling now with crumbling lichen in the ruined courtyard. He gave a wide berth to the uprooted skeleton of the great oak, though he kept his chin jutted forward and his head cocked to listen to his footsteps bouncing around the yawning archway door.

The steps were a bustling hive even early as it was, merchants already clattering up their rickety stalls and speeders coughing sharp petrol fumes into Chirrut’s nose. Then there were the troopers, always on the outskirts, flickering in and out of the Force in dark shifting spots as if he had pressed the heels of his hands to his useless eyes.

Chirrut wound through them all, his path parting clear and congealing back around him as was routine. People had stopped trying to challenge him in the third year. They stopped accusing him of loitering or looking for handouts when it became evident he was as much a fixture of the scrap market as the shelled-in pillars that loomed above them, or the Empire’s twisted cranes and mining equipment crawling tight over the temple’s face like scorpions.

He _was_ loitering. He didn’t _look_ for anything any more, and so the occasional handout was always a pleasant surprise.

The fountain was his first stop, though he tamped down any sincere optimism along with the jagged thirst in the back of his throat when he remembered the booming tannoys pushing the Empire’s latest decree out through the streets. Water was on ration now too, because the aquifers were being pumped towards fracking condensers for the mining operation. Citizens were supposedly allocated two gallons per day, but it quickly became apparent that it was more of a first come, first serve situation, with the Empire always coming first.

Chirrut ambled to a halt below the closest aqueduct and tilted his head to listen, but there was no sloshing, no wet rattling in metal buckets. He sighed again and spoke up over the little knot of grumbling gathered around him.

“I wonder, what is it that Nalrithians drink?” The tiny crowd hushed and scattered from him like woodlice under a torchlight.

A skittering hiss of mandible clicks came from his right and Chirrut adjusted his stance, silently begrudging the lack of weight in his legs that once anchored him firmly with its power.

“Îmwe, again? Your last lesson was not thorough enough?” Siv slunk over to Chirrut’s left, never leaving the cistern unguarded.

Chirrut grinned, and hoped his gums were still bleeding for want of fresh fruit. He did so enjoy looking the part for these thugs; it showed them he had little to lose and they’d be better off saving their blows for each other. “I’ve never been one for learning lessons. Perhaps you could explain to me again why the coffers are always so dry so early in the day, and you the only one here to account for it.”

Siv laughed, a grisly sound full of moving mouthparts. “Not today. I’m under orders, and you’re in luck.” She swayed closer, Chirrut felt his golden Force fronds part and shift around a black mass intruding on his personal space.

Siv smelled of electricity and organic decay, and Chirrut wrinkled his nose in exaggerated distaste as she said, “I’m told you are good stock, Îmwe, so you get your water. Keep that last kidney in good shape, yes? Someone will have more need of it than you, soon enough.”

Chirrut balked. He tried digging broken fingernails into the smooth, knotted wood of his staff for a locus point, something to hold on to as he stumbled backwards over broken cobbles. He shut his eyes against the sudden onslaught, the typhoon in his head that bellowed _not yet, not ready yet, won’t give them my last, not before I hear his voice one last time—_

He swallowed, and thought hard of his third duan in the arid rockfields to the north of the city. He grasped tight when he found the memory, grey and muted and nearly slipped through his widening cracks. The thirst then had seemed insurmountable, like swallowing a boulder and feeling it stretch and break his teeth, lodge in his dry and gasping throat. It had been a torment then, but then was not now, and now he had one fewer kidney.

Back then he had survived, and returned to quiet praise for his perseverance, to flowing honeyfruit milk, to relieved kisses licking life back into his mouth. Now his every movement was hampered by the sharp throb of protest in his back, like a blunt hammer pounding ball bearings into the scrawny meat to the left of his spine, and his only respite was to grovel to the likes of Siv Akreilu.

“I’ll find a puddle.” He smiled benignly, uncaring of how nonsensical the statement was on Jedha.

Of course a blessing like ad hoc water would come at a price too steep to climb. This was what happened when he tried to fill the soft-eyed, naïve hole in his heart himself, it left him more blind than ever to the world’s new order. Left him vulnerable to more blackmail.

He turned his back on Siv’s bristling gunfire chuckle, and limped toward an alley he knew well, one that twisted downhill and led to the shipyards and the city’s eyrie of a spaceport.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Chirrut has a bad few years. A flashback, of sorts.

By the time he reached his sixth year spent alone, Chirrut had descended into a wretched mess.

In the first few months of his purgatory those who fronted the bootleggers’, and still remembered him as a snarling child, made good on their promise to extract those favours that saved his leg from triage amputation that doomsday. First they beat him. They beat him for deserting his roots, now a decade withered. They beat him for softening his edges and shacking up with a bunch of do-gooders with no survival instinct.

The irony of this, given what he had done and ruined, was not lost on Chirrut. It only made him smile and take the blows more gracefully.

They beat him for leading one of the do-gooders to their operation, but why it even mattered any more was a mystery to him. No one cared about a small time black market in the warzone Jedha had become. And evidently it wasn’t even worth coming back for, even to shut it down. Just like Chirrut wasn’t worth coming back for.

So they set him to work, and it was just like it had been before, except that he could fight the competition more ferociously even with his mangled leg. He smuggled contraband and medicine, but when they caught him delivering it to the sick and the poor instead of the Hutts, they beat him again with a severity he had only seen once before, as a child. That man had died, and Chirrut had resolved to be stronger, starting with forcing back his tears.

Chirrut did not die from his last beating, but sometimes he wondered if it would have been a better outcome, given how the long drop of destitution never offered a rock bottom for him to crash into for good. He had crawled to his cave-cell sometime in the hazy fog of those darkest days, the way a dying animal would find a hole to curl up and wait. He was a good smuggler, though, and kept some relief for himself to speed the wrenching healing of his many broken ribs.

Life got worse. He stopped clinging to his stubborn sense of being truly wronged, wronged as deep as it was possible to be. It had only kept him proud and haughty, convinced of being in the right in what he had done. But temple life had apparently instilled a hidden itch within him that could only be scratched by serving, by helping, by atoning.

It pulled his heart from him once again, this realisation, and he had sobbed through the night with his face pressed to the rock instead of his rag pillows. If only he had seen it sooner, what altruism really did, how it saved more of him than running away ever had. He could have avoided all of this. They might never have been parted.

He latched instead to action, and quickly gained a reputation reminiscent of a flipsiding coin. To the Imperial army he was a menace, a wrench in the spokes of their hulking war machine. On one memorable occasion he had hijacked a tank. He only narrowly avoided multiple assassinations through his knife-edge speed, his years of training’s brutal purpose come rocketing from his limbs with the Force’s aid. He had killed men and women and nonhumans alike, but only when absolutely necessary, to ensure his continued fight against his city being crushed further under the Empire’s heel.

 _—It is necessary now! It was necessary then_ _—_

It still made his soul scratch and claw to escape through his mouth, the killing. He knew it was the slippery slope, and that soon he’d be writhing back down there in his past life, hissing at the light and feeding on flesh.

(He wondered, would it make _him_ proud, to know Chirrut had finally killed for his people? Did he want that kind of pride from one so much better than him?)

Killing became easier.

The flipside. To the Jedhan people he was a saint, a saviour in holy robes, but the chants and adulations still crashed discordant in his ears and made him flinch, shake his head with a rueful smile. Guardians weren’t prophets or messiah any more than the Force was a god, and he was still a Guardian. He always would be, because the Force was eternal and Guardians lived to protect the Force, the temple and its kyber. There was still kyber deep in the heart of the mountain, Chirrut knew, just as it burrowed deep into the hearts of certain people, shining good light from their kind eyes and strong deeds.

The kyber would remain long after Chirrut did, he knew this too. He wasn’t blind, then, and was still able to see the lesions and bruising on his thinning skin.

The people praised him for escorting children to safety. For blowing up an Imperial caravan in the desert without detection. They tried to give him alms after his illicit sermons but he had to turn them away with gentle chiding, to spend their earnings on those more worthy. They didn’t know, none of them knew what he had done. Or rather, what he hadn’t, and it choked him sometimes, talons of guilt ripping trenches into his abdomen. They had all lost people in the fall. He didn’t tell them he could have caught some of them before the plunge, if he hadn’t been such a—

 _—_ _always known you could be selfish, Chirrut_ _—_

He befriended people. Built a network of communication to inform on Empire movements. It spread in little tributaries, adding to the already widening river of discontent throughout the city. It was veins pumping oxygen back into a dying body. They had contacts in the spaceport to pass on early news of huge mysterious machines, and arms shipments, and they were ready.

It wasn’t nearly enough. What could ants do against a boot, even ants with venom and fire.

Their uprising was resolutely quashed, and Chirrut only escaped the shackles or a firing squad through his knowledge of the deepest temple catacombs. When he emerged weeks later, squinting into the sun’s cutting glare, it was to the news that many of his friends and contacts had been murdered. The information network was in tatters, his branches outward severed like the long dormant web of energy he still nursed inside of him in secret, foolish hope.

He had let them down, again. He had saved his own hide, again. This kickstarted the beginning of his end, the last pound of wasted away muscle mass pulling him down over the final cliff. He would let Jedha take what it wanted from him, lie back and let them pick his carcass clean like desert vultures.

The city was quieter then, in the aftermath. After their failure many had decided to cut their losses, and those who could leave did so quickly. With fewer true locals there was no one left to care what happened. It became a liminal, transient city, its core and heart carved out to leave a papery molt, a husk easily blown away in harsh desert storms. The tides of crowds washed in and out, full of disappointed pilgrims and offworlders come to gawp at Jedha’s passing, the way people always crane their necks to catch a glimpse of gruesome accidents, reassuring them of their own mortality.

Chirrut knew a family who had not been among the exodus. They had been among the temple’s flock in peacetime and were always kind to him. They participated in his schemes, and thanked him for his varyingly wise counsel, invited him into their little whitewashed house cluttered with browning plants and smelling of diesel. They fed him spartan meals which he inhaled, his stomach stretched and protestingly unfamiliar with the sensation, like a dead and bloated bantha on a hot day.

But when he found them on his second, lengthy walk of shame, they were almost as destitute as he was, their eldest son Mosube sick and jaundiced.

That was it. The Force had granted him yet another opportunity for redemption, and he was quite at peace when he held Mosube’s mother to his chest.

“Chirrut, oh Chirrut, thank you,” she wept.

“The Force of others is always with you,” he replied.

It felt like peeling off his own skin to pre-empt a flaying, going back to the ganglands, but theirs was the biggest market for donors that he knew of.

“You are the middle men here,” he told the smirking Dathomirian, splayed behind his knife-scarred desk. “I know you get a cut before it goes to the donor.”

The boss only laughed sarcastically. “You got me there, Chirrut. We’re not doing this out of the goodness of our hearts.”

“Well, you can keep my cut, is what I’m proposing. If you can guarantee my kidney goes to the boy.” Chirrut stood tall and steady like the beloved temple oak. He would be the last pillar holding Jedha high until it killed him.

The boss glinted sharks’ teeth at him, and shook Chirrut’s hand. He ignored the way the Force strained away from the contact, trying to stay his hand like a repelled magnet.

Chirrut had woken in a crumpled, bloodied heap at the top of the stairs to his home, his lower back tight and aching and inflamed. He cried out as he heaved himself upright, and clung to his staff like a log in rapids as he hobbled off to see Mosube.

He arrived just in time to see the funeral pyre lit. The family were gone before Chirrut could even ask if they’d received his donation.

Even if there was no way to track his subsequent contributions, he reasoned to himself that it was the right thing to do. If he could function perfectly well without part of one lung, or without his spleen, it seemed a fair trade that someone else might benefit. He never asked the Dathomirians who his organs went to. After all, the market only seeped within the bounds of the city walls. He was recycling himself back into his people, his home.

_—what kind of Guardian doesn’t do their utmost—_

He prayed between his bouts of vomiting blood, his fevers. He prayed that it might be enough, that each pound of flesh taken from his body would lighten the load on his spirit.

Then came his last day in the light. He had only given permission for them to take _one,_ he had be practising his forms with one eye closed for months in preparation, re-aligning his depth perception in combat situations.

They took both.

Waking up to utter darkness with rusted nails hammering swarms of gnawing pain behind his sockets, that wasn’t what pushed him irreparably over the brink. That came later. That day was the first and only time he kept the envelope of credits, tucked into his waistband like he had provided them with an exotic dance instead of his very _sight._

The thought whirled around his splitting head in cacophony with a thousand others, each one more panicked than the last until he crawled to the edge of the cliff at the cave’s mouth, scraping his forehead and fingernails against the sharp rock until they bled. Was he selling his body to the Empire, he wondered. He heaved for breath and felt the familiar northwest wind trace sickening cold down the tear-tracks on his cheeks.

If he accepted the money, was that profiting from a good deed? He lay there for half a day, too dehydrated to keep crying. He drooled spittle that tasted of blood just to feel something, one thought drowning out the shrieking tempest of the rest.

 _Would he forgive me for this too? If I gained even a little back from my giving? Would he prefer I gave myself over wholly and completely and without complaint or reparation, even though_ he’s _the one who left Jedha in the end, would it make him love me again_ _—_

In the end it was a moot point, because his body rejected the food he bought with his own blood money. It was as if he could taste Hutt slime on the rations, but at least the sting of stomach acid in his throat distracted from the one that pulled at his ruined eyes, soaking the bandages for his missing corneas, the salt in the botched clouds of scars across his eyeballs where they hadn’t even attempted to repair his optic nerves.

But he learned to cope. He learned to live with it, the way he had learned to live with more hardship than his wasting body could seem to hold, sometimes. The Force would be his eyes, and take him where it willed, he entrusted his entire self to it and learned the movements of those twining golden strands. Just as he had once had an external conscience. He had once had a steady moral compass that always gentled him in the right direction, with laughing reprimands and helpless love.

No, the final, stolen weight that pulled him over the cliff’s edge, caused the rat in him to finally jump ship and plummet all the way down, came after he was blinded.

It happened some time in his fifth year lonely, when he was wading barefoot through the abandoned rice terraces on the temple slopes furthest from his cave. He was poking his staff slowly before him in case of paddycrabs, and humming tunelessly but unusually contented, trying without much heart to remember the way stars looked reflected in rippling water.

He remembered sneaking out at night to watch clusters of meteorites scrawl iridescent across the planet-dappled sky. He remembered waving away protests and thrilling at the feel of a bigger hand in his, tugged easily behind him despite complaints. Perhaps he couldn’t remember the way the water looked those nights, because he hadn’t really been looking at the stars in the sky, but the brightest one next to him.

_—it’s all one big game to you—_

He twisted his head into his shoulders to try and cover his ears against the shade’s goading, but it was gaining more confidence in speaking up each day.

The water was stagnant and foul to drink, but recently he had taken what little pleasure left that he could, exploring other sensations and feeling how they filled his being even without the sight of them. It was cool silk on his stringy calves, like the finely woven robes they used to wear on special occasions.

The east courtyard was silent below him. He could feel the vast, mountainous presence of the temple behind him, the way his senses told him when he was being followed by hulking thugs. He had taken to pressing his ear to the back of his cave, curving towards the faint chiming of the kyber like a flower to the sun. The temple still hummed with the energy, though it was all but a weak encore of the exalting chorus it had been before.

He was more alone than he ever had been. Even the stormtroopers had given up on harassing him. Instead they deemed him a neutralised threat, the mad blind monk still wandering old ruins like a ghost. He was made an example; this is where you’ll sink to if you defy us any longer, or at all.

He still bucked at the ropes of it. He was supposed to be an example of Jedhan grit and resilience, but there was only so much oil in an engine before it failed, and cranked to a shuddering halt.

So it was silent, and nearly peaceful. Until it wasn’t.

It started as nothing but a small ringing in his ears, as though he’d been cuffed in the side of the head. He couldn’t remember if it was the year for the insect migration, the ones that squealed and buzzed for weeks on end, but then, he had lost track of the years some time ago. Cocking his head, he concentrated on possible direction, trying to hear where the echoes bounced to and from _—_ and frowned. There were no echoes. Chirrut turned slowly, lowering into a defensive crouch he would never want or be able to train himself away from, staff poised and swaying like a snake disturbed.

His toes dug into the slimy silt, sodden vegetation brushing eel-like against his ankles. The ringing deepened, gathering like thunder without the flash of lightning to show what hid in the dark.

There were no echoes. The way the shade’s quiet mockery gave no echo except within his sarcophagus head—

The cosmos shuddered and cracked. There was a beat of silence that lasted just a moment, an entire lifetime, as all the universe’s pain was sucked into a pulsing sphere behind Chirrut’s eyes and contained. It detonated.

He screamed.

Thousands upon hundreds of thousands of screams layered and ricocheted around his head, but his was the loudest, rising and falling into hitching air-raid wails as he tried to lunge out of his own skin in search of air, his head jerking as his sanity tried to rip free in search of peace. Water pulled at his robes as he slammed to his knees but it seemed to boil around him, lava hitting an irate sea.

Agony seared through him, alighting every nerve to an inferno so severe it seemed intent on tearing out his spine. The Force shrieked and writhed, the golden wafting tendrils crackling in red bolts erupting away from his convulsing body, crucified into a supernova of pain.

He scrabbled at the submerged dirt but it slipped through his hands, and for the first time since that day so long ago, he unleashed all of it, all the pain to wring his throat and howl out a pleading, strangled, “ _B_ —”

The deafening chorus in his head vaulted to a fever pitch and he fell silent, immobilised by the extremity of it as he stopped breathing, his lungs shriveled meat, the torrents of destruction pummeling his twisted bones like a raging waterfall in a storm.

The temporary dam broke and another roar jolted his body as it exploded from him, until he felt deformed with torture. He prostrated himself utterly to the Force’s mercy and immersed his head and shoulders in freezing water slick with algae, begging for the end.

 

Later, as he lay twitching uncontrollably in his cave, he thought he might have drowned himself if the cataclysm had taken even a second longer to stop. It was over as quickly as it had begun, but the terrible reverberations continued even when the physical pain did not. His rangy arms had barely managed to push him up and out of the water, his ears and nose and mouth clogged with dirt and swilling. That wasn’t the worst of it, though.

The Force was gone. For as long as he could remember, Chirrut had felt an energy shifting and compressing scant few inches from his body, like a comforting humidity. Then of course he had seen it, the pressure manifest in golden stems and leaves.

That day, that quiet afternoon, it had deserted him. He had thought he was alone and blind before, but it was nothing compared to the stumbling dark, true dark. All he had left to navigate was his lifetime of wending through Jedha’s narrow alleys and jungle of levels, its canopies of turrets, spires and billowing flags. And the shade, though it didn’t help in finding his way home so much as hinder. The shade reveled in the dark, and sat in different corners of his mind as he crept slowly back to huddle in his cave, wet and dirty and numb with his staff outstretched.

In time the news reached Jedha, despite the Empire’s efforts. They might have been in the very badlands of the Outer Rim, too small a patch of ground to gain back for the Senate to risk sending an army, but there were ways around the signal blockers and physical mail interception.

It had been something called Order 66, and the Jedi were gone. Chirrut hadn’t been the only one to suffer the effects of such a rend in the Force. Through eavesdropping, stories reached him of pilgrims and other Jedhan holy people—sects he knew little about with no connection to the Whills—collapsing and dying in the streets.

Chirrut hadn’t considered the Jedi in a long time. It’s an odd thing, that when something slips from one’s radar or field of consciousness, it’s as if it ceases to exist for everyone else too. The Jedi had not visited them at the temple very often, but in the years prior to the fall Chirrut could count the instances on one hand, when he put his scattered mind to it. Eventually the very reason they mined, and cut, and polished crystals to stars in the hand, had faded to the back of his mind. It ceased to have any real or practical connotations, the process becoming washed out backdrop to everyday life. The finished stones were shipped away, and with them his concern. He had done his duties, protected the sacred song of them and brought it to the fore.

In retrospect, it seemed as though the Jedi had abandoned them, instead of the other way around. Chirrut’s anger, years tempered by the Force and directed towards the Empire, began to fester behind his breastbone, spreading up to set fire to the words he hurled back at the shade. It curled low and lurking in his belly, like some kind of sick arousal panting for revenge. Where had the Jedi been, all this time? Why hadn’t they done something to _stop it._

Mining commenced a short while after, with no more Jedi, and no more lightsabers in need of all that Jedha ever had to give. The Empire ripped their little moon from its vine, severed its connection to the inner rim and deemed it ripe for plucking, draining.

Every shard of flint that split and crunched loose from the worn hollow in his wall, every splinter lodged in his broken, weeping knuckles, was release. The Force had abandoned Chirrut, as had the Jedi, the Senate, his sight, any remaining Guardians. And _him._ All gone save the shade, and even it retreated from his protruding spines of madness sometimes, begging him to stop instead of goading him to punch harder.

 _A branch can only collide against a rock so many times before it breaks,_ it said. _And you’re nothing but dry twigs these days._

 _Stop being such a fool. Direct it to the source,_ it said. _Remember your training._

_Hit me._

But Chirrut only snarled, “ _No.”_

_crunch_

“These are not for you.”

_crunch_

“These are for my own foolish heart.”

_In the Force there is life_

“For still—”

_no Force_

“—loving you.”

_no life_

 

Over time, over months, the Force did trickle back to him, a glittering band of water to a darkened riverbed, feeble and lethargic from its catastrophic bleeding. Chirrut, soothed and quieted, threw himself back into hours of meditation at a time on the lip of his gale-sanded cliff, the way he hadn’t since the beginning. He vowed not to follow the Force no matter what, but to let it flow through him. He would let the trickle build and fill him up, not allowing himself to be washed wherever it pleased. That was not the way, he saw that now. He would make himself a sail, and harness the Force’s power to move in his own direction. He would be the skiffing plant seed in a northwest wind, his structure spread to catch the updrafts.

Chirrut clung iron-tight to the Force, with a grip forged from atrophying in the deafblind void. He was as much its disciple as the Force was his, and would be one with it, and it with him, until his dying breath.

Life went on.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Chirrut's bad day continues, and gets worse.

The maze of stinking alleys sprawling away from Siv and her grim gesture was actually more confounding to those who could see its corners and dead ends. At least Chirrut could use his other senses, turn left away from the sweet rot stench of an abattoir, curve round and double back when the spice-sweat east bazaar slammed his nose cartilage back into his brain. Head towards the the clanging, shouts, and laser rush of spacecraft purring up and down like gigantic metal bees.

Chirrut shuffled along with his shoulder scraping one dusty wall, the other close enough to drag his hand along. Down there, below the fabric roof that stretched between buildings, collecting moisture and shielding from the midday sun, it was cool and damp instead of dry and freezing.

The port was usually a good place to pick up some credits, offworlders fresh from their ships with eyes not wide enough to take in all of Jedha’s shabby majesty. Inevitably, they all fell victim to the lure of having a real live Guardian recite their Force path to them in a mysterious voice. For any measure of the word “living” that could be applied to Chirrut these days, if he couldn’t scrape enough together for a single neep root.

He had to come to a wheezing halt several times, and sweep his hands around to find the odd pallet or crate to sit down on, staff between his feet while he rubbed at his thigh. A roving pack of canids came loping noisily down the street towards him, just a small one by the sound of them, but Chirrut moved on before they could show more interest in the peeling leather of his boots.

“And you wanted one for the temple,” he said, grinning as he scratched his beard. “I probably have fleas enough for us both. Hah.”

The clamour of the port swelled louder in his ears, and with it his comfort. Blending in among a throng had been the way of it for him since childhood, in gangs, in the temple, in the Jedhan masses straining over one another to reach the sun. He enjoyed the way it allowed for mischief, sly trickery right under the Empire’s nose. He enjoyed the way the crowds would part around him when he rose and fought for them, a starphoenix  acting out the Force’s will. All in the past though, now.

As he felt the meek brush of warmth on his face, Chirrut realised his meandering through the past had taken him to a place more significant than most. The edge of an open plaza, one he knew intimately. The last time he had seen it, the buildings had still sprouted round its edges in the ancient Jedhan style, squat and domed and intricately carved to make up for the lack of wide, welcoming doors that would only let out heat.

He couldn’t hear the splashing of the fountain, which wasn’t a surprise, but his parched mouth filled with moisture at the sweet smell of red bean bao.

_(“You’ve got some… here.”_

_Chirrut’s heart pounded frantic against the inside of his ribs at the gentle thumb wiping his mouth, aching for it to replace itself with lips. Maybe this time. But it dropped away. He swallowed, nearly folding in on himself at the hopeless, agonised affection staring back at him. They stood there, bao cooling sticky in their hands and forgotten, long enough for Chirrut to roll his eyes, because he’d have to take the initiative yet again._

_He shoved the rest of the bun in his mouth and wiped his hands on the warm chest before him, broader than his, chewing with exasperation._

_“Are we going to kiss any time this decade?” he asked, thick through bean paste, but then their mouths were pressed clumsily together, before he could lick it away from his teeth.)_

Chirrut sighed, and allowed himself to tip his head back with a smile and drift there in the sense memory for a spell. He could almost pretend he was back there, fourteen years old and probably heavier than he was at present, unappreciative of the sight of crystalline sunlight through the fountain, or dusky skin flushed under his hands.

Then to his right, down the alley behind the food stall, he heard commotion.

He tilted his head towards it, and made his slow way closer to the jeering, layers of posturing wrapped around sharp cores of actual danger. Hutt enforcers. Klatooinians and Barabel by the height of their voices and buzz on their sibilants, Chirrut thought, maybe some humans too. It didn’t matter, really, a Hutt thug was a Hutt thug, with about the same respect for the Holy City as the stormtroopers. He rolled his chafing shoulders and straightened up, following the alley’s curve as close as he could until the braying gathered into words.

“... think you are, tough guy? All that firepower’s gotta be compensating for something, tell me I’m right.”

“If it’s to keep fuckers away from you, don’t worry man, you stink bad enough for that—”

“Looks like a mangy fuckin’ wookie—”

“Guess nobody told you not to come round here, huh?”

Chirrut half-crouched behind a stack of sheet metal, running his hand over the rusted edges and thinking. An offworlder then, though that was hardly surprising. Grateful tourists gave generously when they felt the Force had intervened on their behalf, even when it came in the shape of ragged young madmen with hollow cheeks. His hand stilled. Hadn’t the raspiest one said something about firepower? He angled his ear to the brewing fight.

“Seriously, you’re a big guy, what you need all them big guns for, comin’ round here? Afraid of a real fight?”

“What’re you hiding, you piece of shit? Gimme that—”

“Bao,” came a new voice, deep and sounding bored with the entire altercation.

The golden trails around Chirrut flashed, pulsed minutely with a silvery holo-blue, and he tightened his fist around his staff to stave off distraction. This person was clearly armed and unafraid, but Chirrut knew the gang had more power, credits, and arsenal behind them. They weren’t the sort to be easily intimidated, but were the sort who liked to play with their food.

“Not the food, shithead, but we’ll take those too. What’ve you got _there_ —”

The voice growled, “Get fucked.”

Howls of laughter bounced around the alleyway like bullets, and Chirrut blinked against them, shaking his head to clear it.

He should do something. He shouldn’t do anything.

“S’it a present? A little piece of junk for your bitch girlfriend—”

“—boyfriend, more like—”

The voice cut them off to grind out, “Yeah, it’s junk.”

“You sound like a Jedha boy, you should know how this works. Just give it to us, and we’ll leave you alone. Or not. Y’know, Jabba’s been looking for someone with pieces like that.”

“Not interested.”

Heavy, clanking steps came Chirrut’s way, and he made a decision just as one of the bigger-sounding gangsters spat, “Wasn’t asking, asshole.”

If he was to die soon, why not do it the way he was always meant to, as a Guardian of Jedha and its people. He let the notion fill him up until he overflowed, fury alloyed with calm until it left a hardened, deadly steel. He stepped out, steadier than he had felt in years, just in time for rough fabric to brush his bony wrist as the person whirled back around to face the gang surrounding them.

The Force around him trembled, then flared to life in a way just like, and nothing at all like it had when the Jedi were massacred. It swooped like an eagle in flight, it rushed from him in vibrant opalescence and he tried not to gasp as he clutched his staff, tried not to show weakness, hiding his jugular from the jackals.

The hyena chorus changed their target, and blurred patches of different densities shifted around and behind him, lurking creatures swimming far too close in black water.

“Well, look at this, Jedha’s very own avenger. You ain’t dead yet, Îmwe?”

Chirrut didn’t mean to, but people just offered such opportunities sometimes. He leaned on his staff and cackled, “So perceptive! And here I thought I was the blind one.”

Eddies of silver swirled around the person in front of him, standing rooted to the spot. Chirrut cocked his head, then remembered that some people found the motion uncanny. He smiled wide and said, “Are they bothering you?”

“Hey, you insane little rat, get the fuck out of here.”

Chirrut ignored him, and tried to listen for any forthcoming clues from the stranger, remembering to school his face away from any marginal worry that he might have picked the wrong fight. Wartime was not coloured two opposing shades; it could very well be that his enemy’s enemy was his to fight as well.

The air shifted around the back of his neck with the hiss of an unsheathed knife, a metallic little viper ready to strike fangs-first. It was faint, but Chirrut didn’t miss the strange, stifled noise the lone man made, buried as it was in the sharp cocking of a substantial gun barking across their tense, still pond. He heard the man’s breathing, controlled but edging on something that could snap control like a twig.

Chirrut wondered what it was that had him so spooked, and shifted his feet apart so slowly it locked his bones tight in his muscles’ jaws.

“We’re not looking for any trouble,” the man said, and this time his voice was not bored at all, but shaking like a leaf.

The unmistakable whining sound of blasters charging, and the tongue-frying ozone taste of electrified scimitars added to the building pressure. Chirrut smiled with all of his teeth. He would not be cowed. Not in his final stand.

He never had been able to keep his mouth shut.

“I am,” he said mildly, and drove the end of his staff through the eye socket of the Klatooinian behind him.

He used the momentum of his backwards lunge to kick his leg high and swung his knee into an abdomen. Felt the crackling snap of ribs under his kneecap, the hard bone no longer cushioned by even a scrap of muscle or fat.

Enraged shouting whirred by him like the sizzling blaster bolts he narrowly avoided, the Force brighter and casting wider around him than it had since before he lost it.

A brutish dark spot to his left. Chirrut ducked and let his fist explode forward to sink crunching into the area he guessed was groin. The shriek of agony confirmed it, and he loosed a single, wild crow of laughter.

He whirled and dodged, but the Force could only burn so brightly for so long. He hadn’t really fought, not for his tattered life, in a while. There had been demonstrations on the temple steps, moving slowly through his favourite forms to applause and tossed credits, but those didn’t block the breath in his throat, or turn his scrawny limbs to dense dark matter.

He stumbled over a limp leg, and the momentary slip was enough to allow a fist through the cracks, slamming into the side of his face.

He felt something loosen. A scuffle behind him, an already deep voice deepening with fury. Chirrut rallied, and bared his bloody teeth.

Warm viscous spatters seared the back of his neck, even as he twirled his staff and forced it upwards into the soft underside of a jaw. He ignored the wet gurgling, and the slickness running down the wood to coat his hands in violence, turning instead to the heavy breathing at his back.

Chirrut shouted, “Are you alright—”

The butt of a gun battered the top of his skull, and Chirrut staggered, slumped to his knees and then his chest, his cheekbone grinding into grit and sand and hard stone like a drill. A heavy boot stepped on the back of his neck. This was it, then. The weight pressed the knot of his throat further down, pressed his eyes shut and he waited, satisfied.

Maybe this would be enough, for redemption. What was less selfish than being ground to dust for Jedha’s winds to take, swallowed by her ravenous streets. Maybe this would make _him_ proud.

Then—a hoarse noise, broken like an animal in slaughter. The jarring shockwave of a propulsed shot to the body above him, and the weight on his neck was gone.

Chirrut lay there in the silence that followed, blood that was not his own pooling and steaming against his cheek. He shut his eyes, and thanked the Force even as he trembled in mourning for yet another botched attempt at atonement.

A tentative touch to his arm, and he flinched, even though the hands were warm and big and honest in their question, the Force twining around eagerly as if to keep them there.

The man immediately withdrew and Chirrut smiled weakly.

“I may be blind, but my legs still work.”

He struggled to his knees and began to pat around for his fallen staff, but before he could start grumbling it was pressed gently into his hand.

“Ah! Thank you, friend.” Chirrut pulled himself upright, unsteady and wracked with a sudden coughing fit when he heard a faint noise below, and to his right.

“Fuck you both,” the dying thug spat. “Fucking scum. You’re dead after this, Îmwe, they’ll take the rest of you and we’ll get the payout. Feed your balls to a kriffing sarlacc.”

Chirrut shook, as time slowed down. He wasn’t dead. After all this time, after his abandonments and all that was taken from him, the Force still found a reason to guide him around and around some miserable carousel. The same thing, every day, but always worse.

He was so tired. So relentlessly hungry. And under it all, hidden after so many years by the lapping waves of the force, no love to keep it down, his dark and ugly shipwreck still teemed with sharks. He was so murderously, monstrously angry.

Perhaps the Force was burning, streaking around like falling stars so brightly today as a flare. A signal, that these gruesome events were the way to tear himself free of the carousel.

In the end, his new conclusion came quickly.

“You’re right,” he said, and raised his foot.

The big, mute man burst out, “No, no don’t, leave it-”

Chirrut judged his positioning, and stamped his boot again and again into the remaining living face. Wet crunching drowned out the shade, and filled the big man’s horrified silence. Shards of bone cut through his thin boots to slice satisfaction in his leg, blood and viscera seeping through the loose sole. The sensation made him stop, and shake globs of it from his foot.

He sniffed the thick, metallic air and spat a loose tooth to the side to hear it rattle. Just as well that he had come to his decision, because eating roots now would have been impossible. He turned and clasped his fist in his other hand, bowing low. His wild hair brushed the other man’s stomach.

“Apologies,” Chirrut said brightly. “Though you don’t seem like a man averse to violence.” He gestured around, hoping their havoc looked as bad as it smelled. “Just how many guns do you _have?_ ”

The man only stood, and Chirrut frowned at the lack of even a hint of gentle breathing. He tried a different tack.

“I am Chirrut Îmwe. You might be…?” Silence. “You don’t have to thank me, but earlier I heard you say something about bao? Give a blind man his last meal?”

A harsh breath rushed from the man, and Chirrut heard the rustle of heavy fabric, felt the air next to his swollen cheek shift, and settle again. He waited, but the only sounds were the molasses hum of the plaza, the bright baying of a canid far away. Well. Tangible rewards weren’t the reason he did these things anyway.

He sniffed and wiped a trickle of blood from his nostril. “No? Alright then. May the Force of others continue to be with you,” he said, bowing shortly again before turning away.

He prodded past the strewn bodies with his staff, picking his way through with one hand on the rough stonework, peeling dry moss. Tripping a little over something with a squelch, he caught himself on the wall as the shade snorted at him with no sound.

“Stop,” he muttered, but it was halfhearted and fond. Maybe it would find someone new to haunt once Chirrut was gone. “Be quiet.”

By the time he made it back to Siv’s, there was no mistaking the faint clank and rattle of armour and weaponry following him at a distance, but he chose to ignore it. Two could play at the silent game, and there was no law against free movement. Maybe the man just liked the sight of his skinny backside. The thought was so abruptly funny that Chirrut had to double over and wheeze laughter through his coughs, people shying away from him.

Siv was exactly where Chirrut had left her. He could hear her sharpening the carapace blades on her arms.

He planted his feet and gazed serenely up into the blankness. The rasping stopped.

“Changed your mind?”

He shrugged, and tried to look contrite. Faking expressions had become a lot more difficult without being able to see other people’s reactions, but it was still a useful skill.

“Afraid so. I couldn’t find a single puddle, can you imagine?”

“I don’t care,” said Siv, and Chirrut listened to the sloshing thump of two heavy containers dumped at his feet. He bent slowly to grasp one handle, but the cooler wouldn’t budge.

His arms were nearly useless enough, even without the drain of adrenaline after a brawl.

“How much is there here?”

“Four gallons each,” Siv clicked at him, cruel amusement coating her scuttling syllables. “Not too heavy are they, Îmwe?”

He waved a dismissive hand. “All relative, Siv, but thank you for your concern. It’s simply a lot for one person.” A growing crowd had gathered to watch, unused to seeing so much water at once.

“I’ll return for them later, if it’s all the same to your employers,” Chirrut said, already limping away. He had been on his feet for too long, and coupled with the fight, his torn up leg was chewing into his hip with blunt, throbbing molars.

“I said I don’t care, but it’s up to you, yes?” Siv drawled, obviously standing to her full height by the way the crowd jittered wide again like juice from a stamped berry.

Chirrut let her last, jeering trill glance off his sharp shoulders. “Remember, no one wants a kidney like a raisin, temple monkey!”

He smiled benignly and began chanting to the Force to distract from his arid throat, screaming in protest. The Force had been trailing behind him all along the trek back towards his home, silvery and blown out like great tail feathers waiting for something to catch and ride their slipstream. Now the tendrils shortened and coalesced into a quivering, anticipatory mass in Chirrut’s wake.

Then came the muffled zap of a body swallowing blaster fire, mingling with a shrill, insectoid cry. A few abrupt shouts of alarm, quickly subsiding; the crowd behind him rippled in a brief frisson of instinct, but it was just another day. If someone wanted Chirrut’s water badly enough to kill one of the Hutts’ most ruthless enforcers, so be it.

It had been four days since he had eaten anything. He hadn’t drunk since the morning of the previous day, when he had wrung the vile juice from a knotweed into his mouth. Chirrut staggered his way back up the temple steps, sweeping his staff around in thirsty, pounding disorientation, bumping off the weathered archway to the quiet courtyard.

The clanking footsteps that had followed him all the way from Siv’s became more apparent, their careful, deliberate echoes loud in Chirrut’s sanctum. The gentle slap of water on plastic stopped when Chirrut did, too. He sighed.

“Not much of an assassin, are you? You’re very loud. What’s the use in saying nothing if you’re going to lumber after your mark like a bantha in heat?”

A small, strangled noise to his right. The man was over by the uprooted oak, then. Chirrut tilted in his direction.

“Can I at least drink my water before you kill me? She was right, you know, you won’t get many credits for one withered kidney.”

No answer yet again. For all that he was on the edge of death, Chirrut still found enough energy within himself to throw his hands up and huff, before lurching away to his staircase. The footsteps hurried to catch up and clattered down behind him as he edged into his cave.

Chirrut swayed where he stood. The sun, weak and shallow as it was in its bathing of Jedha, was still enough to hammer blunt spikes into his temples, draining any remaining liquid from his brain. He hung his head and breathed slowly, trailing his fingers over the hundreds of scratches in the wall one last time, each one a testament to continued survival. Continued failure at martyring himself. Each one a day without  _him._

The man behind him dropped the water cask bodily. Chirrut touched the very last scratch, the one he left that morning, his fingers lingering. He turned and spread his arms out, ready.

“It isn’t much, I know. But it is here. I can still hear the kyber.”

They stood there, and Chirrut listened to the man swallow, over and over again, breathing unsteadily. He really was a terrible assassin. The northwest wind intruded and snagged at Chirrut’s clothes, sweeping the dust out to the drop along with his worries.

It wasn’t his preferred way to go, but the Force was settled and content, so it must have been time.

Thirst and hunger and exhaustion scattered dark, crawling beetles over his consciousness, chewing holes. Not much time left. He lowered his arms, and cast his eyes around, unseeing but still searching to hold a gaze.

“Are you going to shoot me any time this decade? Preferably while I can still stand? At least give me that dignity.”

The shade whispered, _Chirrut, look._

He tried. He collapsed.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Chirrut has a much better day.

For the first time in years, Chirrut didn’t wake to the northwest wind. He woke to a gentle beeping, and the faintest hum of air traffic, and the smell of warm pastry gamely covering the sting of antiseptic.

He woke to the sound of his own voice in his ears, surfacing from underwater in the middle of a word, a ragged, whimpering, “Baze—”

The dream had been washed out and away from the shores of his unconscious mind some years ago. It was always the same. Baze stayed with him in the bunker and his leg was healed, his leg had never opened because they saved the temple. They were still in the bunker, though, they were back in the garden where Chirrut had asked about the temple rules on marriage because Baze knew these things, and Chirrut asked him—

“Baze?” The shade stayed quiet.

He couldn’t feel the soft linen under his right hand, because there was warm skin there, and coarse hair brushing his wrist. Before his second word had even finished, there was a jolt against his palm and the warmth disappeared. Chirrut curled his fingers, and felt the first tender pull of a catheter behind his knuckles. His palm was hot, and wet.

Concentration came easily, more easily than it had in a length of time he couldn’t quite grasp. It was almost as if he could see again, and Chirrut rolled his head against—a pillow, it must have been, smiling at nothing. He tried to find the reason his body felt so light, and so solid, floating so softly he could have blended with the bedclothes. No longer was he weighed down by twin rocks of starvation and thirst in the pit of his stomach, even as his skin and bones strained to disintegrate like fungus spores. He rolled his tongue against the roof of his mouth, and relished the smooth glide of it, the lack of barbs or catching on rough palate scabs of dryness.

The person, though. It must have been the man, who brought him here, and Chirrut turned his newfound focus to the broad stillness in the Force. His breathing stopped, and he clutched automatically at the bunching linen under his fingertips as the rhythmic beeping ramped into a sprint.

Why in the stars hadn’t he seen it before? The holo-blue web, the shimmering net of energy once ripped but never left untended, in the secret hope that one day it would bind itself back to another soul.

It strained, taut and blazing between him and the man, and Chirrut’s chest blazed with it.

“Baze,” he said, a third time, and this time he would demand an answer. The softest curl of a knuckle brushed the back of his hand, and Chirrut trembled. He had to know. He _had to know_.

“I was wrong. Chirrut, I was wrong.”

Without the anger in the alley, without the voice strained through a fight-hardened sieve, it didn’t matter the words, because with them came the warmth. With them came the husky burr in the middle of Chirrut’s name, the middle of his soul, the zephyr round his name that never knew it was a curse.

“I’m so sorry,” Baze choked, but Chirrut couldn’t hold himself back, and Baze had never asked him to before.

It soared up from his full stomach, his full to bursting heart, and exploded from his sated throat in one bounding, starphoenix burst of happiness. The hot wetness on his cheeks was the most wonderful monsoon he had ever felt, and he hiccuped as he tried to laugh through his sobs, the blistering, endless desert of grief inside him finally awash with soothing relief.

His messy outburst turned to a heavy coughing fit, the hollow punch of it gripping at his lungs, and Chirrut crumbled in on himself to hold in the blood.

He didn’t cough anything up, which was a pleasant surprise, and he subsided, lying curled on his side. Baze’s breathing was all wrong, hitching inhales and shuddering exhales, but Chirrut only waited. Baze always took time with his words, even more so when working his way slow and steady through a difficult topic. Chirrut knew that each time Baze opened his mouth, he worried something damaging would try to ride the line of communication, slip inside to batter his gentle heart. He knew, and he remembered never feeling prouder of Baze than the day he had revealed how terrifying it had been to walk up to Chirrut first and extend the hand of friendship. The biggest gamble of Baze’s careful life, but there was no winning in a gamble without some risk of loss.

Baze knew what to do if he couldn’t find the words right now. Chirrut squeezed his fist around the drying tears on his palm, and uncurled, laying his hand slowly and deliberately at the edge of the bed. He had waited long enough. He could wait for this too.

That said, he had forgotten how painfully frustrating Baze’s silences could be, frustrating for Chirrut because he longed to help, and painful because he knew every inch of the hurt that was clamming Baze shut. He had forgotten so much. He had remembered so much. Chirrut sighed fondly, and did what he always did. Took the initiative.

“I knew it was enough,” he said, slowly rubbing incredulous fingers over his strange, clean body, the slippery patches of bactawrap. “I knew all along, if I gave enough I could get us both back. I told you!”

He heard Baze shuffle closer, felt the pull of his sheet as Baze clutched the fabric next to Chirrut’s outstretched hand so hard it might tear. He left an inch of space between their skin.

“You’re—” Baze started, but it was so hoarse he cleared his throat and began again. “You’re not making any sense, Chirrut.”

“Hah! There’s nothing new,” crowed Chirrut. The sheet trembled, and Baze made a familiar, reluctant chuffing noise, though it was wet and throaty.

“You never told me anything. I was gone, I left you in that hole—” Baze was crying again, but Chirrut frowned.

“Yes, that’s right.” He thought Baze must have bowed his head to weep into the mattress, because a mass of hair fell heavy across his arm. Chirrut untangled his hand from a braid as he thought hard, and buried his fingers into the thick of it where it hid the nape of Baze’s neck. Baze gave a quiet, broken noise and clung harder at the sheet.

“You left me, yes. Why—why didn’t you come back? Are you back?”

Muffled and desperate, “Yes, yes Chirrut I’m back, I won’t ever—didn’t mean—”

Chirrut, despite his earlier delight, was starting to crumple. Baze was here. Chirrut could feel him, touch him, which meant that Baze had been out there all this time, not dead, like Chirrut had sometimes entertained until the thought grew too terrible and massive in his head that he thought he might go mad. A leviathan passing through the darkness between stars, eldritch and unthinkable.

Baze had just been—gone.

“I was so alone,” he whispered. “Why didn’t you say anything?” He blinked, uncaring of the pools welling against the bridge of his nose, and spilling over to the mattress.

Baze turned his head on the linen, and they were so close together. Chirrut felt the warm, uneven gusts on his face as Baze mumbled, “What? I wanted to. Every day I tried to reach you—”

Distant sighted memories were clashing into one another, but Chirrut’s mind was still too riddled with fraying holes to keep them all inside.

“The wind,” he said. “In the mornings, it was you. You were there, but you would leave again. All those times you came and spoke to me, you never told me if you were coming back.”

Over the years Chirrut had learned to catalogue each and every different kind of Baze’s silences. He knew the quiet upset, of course, and the surly ones when there were too many people, and he couldn’t think of anything nice to say, and Baze Malbus didn’t lie. There was the angriest of all, but Chirrut had tried to distance himself from that one. He didn’t care to familiarise himself with it. There was the one when he was so turned on he couldn’t speak for fear of vulnerability, kept quiet until he was alone with Chirrut, safe.

This one now, was pure, terrified confusion.

Baze began, tentatively, “Chirrut, I don’t… I was never… it was only dreams. Only dreams, baobei. I had them too.”

“ _No_ ,” snapped Chirrut, fisting his hand in Baze’s hair and shaking his unresisting head back and forth, much gentler than his voice. “All along, you said things to me, cruel things, and I was glad because you were there and because—because I deserved it.”

He felt Baze bury his face further into the bed, further against Chirrut’s stomach with an ugly, guttural noise. He was chanting, “No, no, no,” urgent and shattered, and Chirrut let go of his hair to paw for one of Baze’s warm, gun-calloused hands. Baze grasped at him like an Endorian flytrap clamping its jaws together in hunger, in prayer.

No one had touched Chirrut in anything less than anger, for so long. He had forgotten what it felt like, to be cradled like he was something worth fighting for, and not just something to fight, to be stripped down for parts. Even while Baze’s sobbing shook the bed underneath them, Chirrut marvelled at the touch of another person. Not just any other person. Baze, his Baze, with his faithful hands that still shook when they made love and spread tiny, shivering questions all over Chirrut’s skin, every time unsure of where they would land next. It was still wonderful, knowing _Baze_ was touching him. Chirrut always answered the same way: _Yes._ He would let Baze’s hands roam anywhere they wanted.

Chirrut felt a glow, a magma flow of warmth spread from Baze’s hands on his, that spilled into the spaces left by hunger and missing organs. He smiled, and hushed at Baze, coaxing his head up to feel his grief-hot forehead.

Baze stuttered out, “That wasn’t me, Chirrut, I wasn’t saying those things to you. I said them once—never again, you deserved none of them. None of _this._ The words you heard—just, just nightmares.”

Chirrut hummed thoughtfully. “In the nightmares you left. Am I—I’m not dreaming now, am I?” He patted around himself, and at the wall, but the downy futon didn’t harden into stone. The wall was smooth mud plaster and bore no flint-scratchings.

“You’re not dreaming, I promise you.”

Chirrut narrowed his eyes, and said, “Prove it.”

Baze’s double grip on Chirrut’s hand loosened, but Chirrut hauled him back. “Leave, and I’ll wake up.” He closed his eyes. All the talking really was exhausting. He hadn’t talked this much to someone in years.

He drifted for a while, waiting for the northwest wind to push the daily millstone into action, grinding him further to a pulp. Then he was startled awake again to Baze crushing his hand and pleading like he was begging for his life.

“Please Chirrut, please come back, please don’t—don’t go, I’m here, I’m not leaving, I’m not ever leaving—”

“Alright then,” Chirrut said, and shook Baze’s hand a little where it twined with his, so Baze wouldn’t feel so bad about it trembling. He fell silent for a while, waiting for Baze to collect himself, or for Baze to let Chirrut collect him.

“Please,” Baze choked again, hushed. “Please. I have no right to ask you to take me back—”

“You never left,” soothed Chirrut, but Baze cried out like a wounded animal.

“I _did_ , and I’ll never stop regretting—but now—now I have _you_ back I can’t, I can’t lose you again.”

“Baze,” said Chirrut. “Baze, come here.”

Baze came forward, like the shifting of tectonic plates. Chirrut tugged at him gently, guiding his shaggy head to lie cradled in the hollow of his sternum, where he could feel Chirrut’s heart, his breathing. Baze wept silently, convulsive shudders wracking through them both as he clung to Chirrut’s skeletal sides. Chirrut felt wet sorrow against his stomach, scrubbed indelibly into his skin by the rough scratch of a short beard. He searched through the cascade of hair to find an ear, so perfect a fit in his hand, stroking it with his thumb.

“My lamb,” he murmured. “Baobei. You don’t have me back. You can’t take back what you never lost. I will always be yours.”

Baze sobbed out, “ _Please,”_ and curved tighter over Chirrut, gripping his sides and his bony shoulders hard enough to bruise.

Chirrut meant every word. It was why he was alive. Most of the problem, most of the reason he had still clung to the side of the mesa with bloody fingernails like a thorny weed, had been his fundamental inability to stop being in love with Baze. The hope of being able to say goodbye.

Dear, serious Baze, bearing cracks in his tortoiseshell armour sealed with molten gold, with a capacity for love so deep it still took Chirrut’s breath away.

After a few wandering minutes, when Baze had gentled into petting softly at his chest, Chirrut cleared his throat. “Are you feeling better now? You’re crying an awful lot today.”

Baze let out a teary snort so loud he seemed to surprise himself. He sputtered, “Am I not allowed? So are you!”

“Yes, but I’m wounded and delirious, I have an excuse.”

This sobered Baze up far too quickly for Chirrut’s liking. He felt cooler air play along his protruding ribs as the edge of his blanket was lifted gently.

“Are you hurting?” Baze said, worry thick in his voice. “Chirrut, tell me.”

“Just my heart,” he shot back, cheerily. The jagged trench of Baze’s unhappy silence opened up between them, and Chirrut groaned. “I’m joking, Baze. I’m sorry.”

Baze’s tongue came unstuck and he settled the blanket back down, mumbling in that hurt way of his, down into his chest. Chirrut knew. He could picture it so clearly, and suddenly the weight of that clear image, of the tall, umber-golden boy with calf-wet eyes he loved so desperately, it all came slamming into Chirrut like a rogue bantha with its horns lowered.

“You’re really here,” he said, groping around again for Baze’s hand, relieved when it was caught and held tight. The Force sang its shining through every whorl on his fingertips, every curve of his ear. “Baze, I’m _sorry_ —”

“It’s alright—”

“No, not that. For before. I said things to you that I never should have.” Chirrut drew a deep breath that pried fingers under his ribcage, trying to split it apart. “I was selfish, and cowardly. You were right about that. Our bad tempers are too evenly matched, it’s no wonder we’re meant for each other.”

Chirrut heard the rustle of Baze’s braids as he shook his head. “At least you didn’t leave,” Baze said, bitterness sharp in his voice. “I told you, I was wrong. All these years I’ve thought of what to tell you first. As long as you knew that.”

Chirrut could sympathise. Sometimes there had been so many things he wanted to tell Baze that he just—started saying them aloud, hoping the Force would carry his messages for him. So foolish. His efforts had produced nothing but the shade, in the end, the furious shadow cast down upon him as Baze had climbed the ladder out of Chirrut’s life.

Baze was rubbing his thumb softly over Chirrut’s knuckles. With a practiced steadiness, he spoke as if reading from a script in his mind. “I see now, that you were right. The temple was going to fall regardless of our actions, and—I was too sheltered to realise that one idealistic young fool dying for his cause wasn’t enough to turn the tide of war.”

Chirrut would never dream of interrupting this rare, eloquent stream of Baze’s thoughts. Though it was shakier, Baze continued, “This war, Chirrut. It’s… there’s no room for moral high ground. Even if there were I’d have no leg to stand on. The things I’ve done…” Again he tried slipping his hand from Chirrut’s, as if afraid he’d taint him. The idea was laughable, but Chirrut only held him tighter.

He said, “Knowing you—I know you’ve only done what you felt necessary. It’s what I should have done in the first place, I know that now. We will only achieve the future we want by fighting for it. I only saved what was most important to me.” Baze squeezed his hand. “But in doing so, I abandoned what was most important to you. I don’t blame you for being angry.”

Baze said, “I wasn’t really angry at you. And the temple wasn’t the most important thing to me.”

Chirrut smiled sightlessly at the ceiling. “You know, I always envied you and your morals. They were impractical, but lovely, just like your ears. But it’s possible to live without both, and still be human.”

He ignored the indignant little grunt, moving himself to the edge of the low bed, closer to the warmth he knew came from Baze blushing. “I liked them. Ears and morals both. I’d never met anyone like you before.” He grinned, the silly way that had always made Baze’s eyes go softer still. He heard a hitch of breath and kept going.

“I’ve yet to meet anyone like you, Baze.”

Baze laughed faintly, even as another warm droplet splashed their hands.

“Don’t start again,” Chirrut grumbled, and Baze laughed harder. “So, you see. When you were off Force knows where learning how not to be a martyr, I was learning how to stop being so selfish. By, ah—chasing martyrdom.”

Baze stopped laughing immediately, and Chirrut waited for the pieces to slot, hoping Baze wouldn’t be too harsh on either of them.

“ _Chirrut,”_ Baze said, his voice cracked open and smashing to pieces between them. Chirrut’s hopes went tossed to the wind. “Gods, are you saying—? My idiot ranting caused this?”

“No, listen. And _stop_ trying to let go of my hand, it’s not going to happen.”

He felt Baze slump against the bed and the motion was so familiar, such a sensory memory etched into his heart; Baze, so big and floppy and content to amble along behind Chirrut, slouching in the shade with his straw hat over his face while Chirrut tumbled and rolled. He felt the weight of Baze’s upper body on the covers beside him and grinned, a tight sunburst of joy flowering in his belly. He wondered if there were any other differences he was missing, besides the hair and the beard. His Baze. Here and real and smelling of gun oil and bao.

“Baze, I know you never listen to me—”

“Lie.”

“—but I want you to hear this, and take it to heart. You did not do this. The Empire didn’t do this to me, even if they created the circumstances. But circumstances only extend so far. If one’s faith is fervent enough, they will disregard circumstance, at the cost of those around them. That is what I did to you.”

“So the Force is to blame,” Baze said darkly, and Chirrut rolled his eyes.

“See, already you aren’t listening. Yes, to begin with I was angry with you, with myself. I thought I was only doing what the Force willed, but in time I came to realise you were right. I was using my idea of the Force as a sentience as… an excuse. A crutch, if you will. The Force always aligned with what I wanted, as you said, because I pretended it gave me permission.” He waved his free hand around, in the hope that Baze would see the shimmering aurora in his gesture, the one that hung around their places in the Force in rippling curtains.

Baze stayed silent, and it was the surly one from parties spent holding his tongue. Chirrut jostled their arms.

“Do you see now? I did this to myself. It took two eyes, a spleen, one kidney, part of a lung and, quite frankly, a ridiculous amount of blood for me to realise it was all my own doing. The Force isn’t _alive,_ as such, any more than we can say the wind is alive, or the universe is alive. We really should have attended more philosophy lessons, don’t you think?”

Baze made a chastened little scoffing noise, but Chirrut felt his palm begin to sweat. “You were always the one who wanted to… you know.”

“Neck,” said Chirrut, delighting in Baze’s strangled laugh.

“Yes, that. Keep going.”

“Well, the Force is just another word for the universe’s energy, at a frequency that can be harnessed by sentients. But it’s still just… the universe. What you do, or I do at any moment, is what the entire Force is doing at the point we call here and now. Just like a wave is something the entire ocean is doing. It’s just us. Some people are just better attuned to the ways they can manipulate it. That’s why, when—”

“Order 66,” Baze muttered grimly. “Even I felt something. Chirrut, were you—?”

He grimaced. “It wasn’t much fun. But it proves my point. The Force wasn’t allowing people to die, or actively killing those most sensitive to it, the Empire was. But so many Force-sensitives dying killed part of the Force with them.”

“Right,” Baze said, his opinion shining through like a spotlight through parted shutters. Chirrut had always adored the way Baze was able to filter so many emotions in so few syllables, when he himself had been banned from speaking unless spoken to during classes with more severe Masters. Baze was able to cut people to withering stems if they needed it, but Chirrut had always flourished and sprouted anew, and stronger. Baze was trailing fingers over Chirrut’s wrist. Chirrut wondered if he knew he was doing it. “But your eyes?”

“Ah, yes. It was my own doing, was my point. Not some phantom hand compelling me to sell my eyeballs for credits. Only me, hoping to apologise to my people, and to—” He stopped, but Baze would know regardless. Chirrut could have kicked himself. Baze didn’t need to carry Chirrut’s sob story around his neck. He held his breath as Baze’s hands kneaded guilt into his own, jerky and rough.

“To me,” Baze said flatly. “Well, at least I was wrong about something.”

Chirrut swallowed. He reached out, tentative at finding Baze’s arm to be quivering again, but his clenching stomach settled when Baze covered his hand with his own and patted it.

“Wrong about what?”

“That day, I said you knew how to look out for yourself. _Clearly_ I was mistaken.”

Chirrut couldn’t help it, drifting around in a drugged haze as he was. He snickered, but Baze talked over him.

“It’s not funny. I spent six years trying to get back home, to find you like this. I can’t bear it. Let me protect you from now on.”

Chirrut bristled. “You know how I feel about pity. I’m not easing anyone’s conscience unless it’s to get them to do things for a poor blind man.”

Baze snorted, and pulled Chirrut’s palm up to kiss firmly in the centre. Chirrut let him. “It’s not my conscience you have to worry about,” he said. “My conscience will never recover from what I’ve done to you. It’s about the way you killed those men.”

 _Ah. Of course._ He remembered how the voice had implored him to stop—really, how hadn’t he recognised it as Baze? No matter.

“Yes,” said Chirrut, as if discussing the latest sandstorm. “I do that a lot now.”

Baze faltered, then resumed nuzzling at his hand like a felinx. Chirrut brushed a finger along the perpetually concerned tilt of Baze’s brow, and smiled when he felt a small answering one under his wrist.

“Don’t you… dislike it?” Baze asked.

“I don’t _like_ it, but it is as I said. There is no hiding from real life.”

He cupped Baze’s cheek as he felt him nod, decisive. “You won’t have to any more. I’ll do the killing for both of us,” Baze declared.

Chirrut’s heart swelled too full for his wasted body, and cracked open to spill messily into his chest cavity, drowning him in sorrow and affection for the man. Baze, who tried to smuggle the pygmy bantha indoors when he discovered their purpose, which had been quite obvious to everyone else. Baze, who had solemnly explained where babies came from to an enormous class of wide eyed novitiates, while Chirrut guffawed into his elbow at the edge of the dais. Baze, who avoided stepping on insects in the temple gardens, offering to do all of Chirrut’s killing for him.

“No, foolish man. You don’t need to, this is the path we are walking and these are the obstacles the Force sets out for us. This is life now, you were right. Besides.” Chirrut snagged hold of Baze’s collar and pulled himself upright before Baze could reprimand him. Baze fumbled to stack pillows at his back, shuffling forward on his knees.

“Besides what?” he muttered, checking the drip in Chirrut’s hand.

“ _Besides,_ no potential purgatory of my own making could be as hellish as the one I’ve been living without you.”

Baze’s hand stilled where it was re-taping Chirrut’s IV line. Chirrut pulled again on the collar of Baze’s robes, or whatever they were, drawing them further together. He had never been more soul-suckingly regretful for the loss of his sight, than in that moment. Never again would he see the dusky, desert sunset spill down over Baze’s smooth cheekbones in a flush. Never again would he see the happy quirk in the corner of his naturally mournful mouth, or the way his ears twitched when he smiled or ground his teeth.

With a jolt, Chirrut realised not one of those things was lost to him. He still had his hands, after all. He could have cried from the giddy dive of his stomach.

Baze was still hovering over him, his big hands soft but reassuring on the sides of Chirrut’s neck. He cleared his throat, and touched their foreheads together, bumping at Chirrut’s nose with his own.

“Chirrut,” he mumbled. “Can I kiss you?”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So Chirrut's philosophical conclusions about the Force in this chapter, and in chapter 3 are lifted pretty much shamelessly verbatim from Alan Watts, who was extremely influenced by eastern thinkers, Buddhism, and Taoism. Since that was a lot of the basis for the Force in the OT, I thought it fit. You can find the two examples [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LgZ73Lc5VS8) and [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mMRrCYPxD0I).


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The better day becomes a better night. Long chapter ahead, oops!

"Chirrut," Baze mumbled. "Can I kiss you?"

Chirrut tilted his head and tried to keep his mouth in as flat a line as possible, without any success. “What kind of stupid question is that?”

He felt Baze blink slowly, so still and close together that his eyelashes tickled Chirrut’s face. Chirrut let go of the rough collar to slide and palm at Baze’s flushing throat, his quickening pulse.

“I—”

“ _Yes,_ you idiot. Force preserve us.”

Baze kept grousing, tiny subvocal complaints forming soft shapes to press into Chirrut’s lips. It was so gentle, Chirrut didn’t even realise Baze was kissing him at first, thought the minute pressure was simply the force of Baze’s deep consternation, building from the broad echo chamber of his chest. Then Baze parted his mouth just a fraction, to cradle the bow of Chirrut’s upper lip in his own, and Chirrut _gasped._

His brain felt replaced by his heart, his head pounding wildly as his entire face flushed blood hot. Baze was relentless, and relentlessly tender in the way he lapped at Chirrut’s mouth, drinking him in like he had been the one in the desert all this time, dying from thirst. Perhaps he had.

“Nnn,” Chirrut moaned, and wound his arms tight around Baze’s neck, kissing and coming apart for barely half an inch before diving back into one another again. Baze was shaking violently, and his hand slipped from Chirrut’s jaw to grasp at the pillow behind him.

Chirrut would have to thank Baze for whatever was in the drip, because some strength had returned to his frail arms. He clutched at the back of Baze’s head, pulling him closer and closer until their lips weren’t even moving, just desperately attached and breathing life back into one another. Perhaps it wasn’t entirely just his regained strength, Chirrut thought, that was holding Baze tight enough to climb inside his emaciated body. Chirrut would let him. It wasn’t even a question of letting; he had always wanted Baze to burrow in and fill him out, hiding his own bulk and worries inside Chirrut’s harder shell.

It was a relief that Baze still wanted to. It was wonderful.

Baze was breathing shallow through his nose to fuel his near inaudible whimpering, still so deep, and vibrating into Chirrut’s head like the sweetest earthquake. Chirrut grinned against his mouth and took pity, letting him up to suck in breath.

A sudden pang snapped through him so hard he felt whiplash in his stomach. Chirrut wished he could see this. He went with second best, and raked his hands through Baze’s hair and around to his face, one hand on a burning ear and the other on the soft pad of jawline. Just the same. Mostly the same, save for short bristles under his palm. He traced the gentle slope of Baze’s lip, the wry curl at its corner, thumb damp from his own saliva there. He felt Baze swallow, and raised his eyebrows in a silent question.

A beat of stillness, and then a ducking nod into his hand. Chirrut laughed to himself. Just as well he had a hold of Baze’s face; he’d have to make it clear that Baze’s silence during intimacy posed more of an obstacle than usual, now.

For now he settled back against the wall, the pillows, and Baze followed as if magnetised. Chirrut’s entire upper body felt warm enough to melt. It stirred memories of slipping into underground pools of steamy, kyber-filtered water, when Baze huddled close to kiss at his upper lip, his lower, and gently touch his tongue to Chirrut’s waiting mouth.

Chirrut tilted eagerly up to meet him, licking there at Baze, back where he belonged, _inside him,_ when the motion nudged a shooting pain through a gap in his gums.

“Ow,” he muttered crossly, around Baze’s retreating tongue. Baze curved a hand around the crown of Chirrut’s skull and nudged at him to press a kiss to the sore throb in his cheek, resting his forehead on Chirrut’s temple.

Chirrut tugged at the thick braid falling across the bridge of his nose, and let his mind wander. The background beeping had climbed to an insistent, shrill reminder of what Baze still did to him. What he would always do. He prodded his tongue at the space left by the most recent missing tooth and smiled at the metal taste, even though it hurt.

“I told you I needed the iron,” he whispered against Baze’s ear. Baze stilled, and pulled back, touching the pads and wires stuck to Chirrut’s chest.

“Alright. Alright now, shh. No more kissing.”

Chirrut whined and curled his fingers back around Baze’s rough collar.

“No, come back, I’m just lightheaded. Can’t you turn that thing off?”

“Absolutely not,” Baze said firmly, and moved off to kneel next to Chirrut again, though never out of arm’s reach. “You should sleep. I can adjust your dose, if you’re in pain?”

Creeping panic closed a fist around Chirrut’s trachea, and he thought of the drifting dark, the leviathan between the stars. He clawed at the placket of Baze’s clothes, the teeth of a zip, it felt so real—

“No please, I’ve slept enough—I don’t want to go back. Haven’t I slept enough?”

Baze wasn’t dislodging his begging hands, only running his own down the spare muscle in Chirrut’s skinny forearms, easing him.

“Three days, Chirrut, but you’re not well. You need rest.”

Chirrut glowered, and tugged harder at him. “No. No. Just keep talking, that’s restful to me.”

“Fine,” Baze grunted. “But if you fall asleep I’m not waking you. I’ll be here. What do you want to talk about?”

What _didn’t_ Chirrut want to talk about? He wanted to hear it all, because the stories written by Baze’s expressions, the twitches of his eyebrows, and his soul bared in his eyes for anyone to see, safe in the knowledge that Chirrut was the only one who looked for it—those were all lost to him now. Chirrut closed his eyes, and prayed silently for Baze to realise he was still looking, and always would, even if he couldn’t see. Another time, he’d tell him. Baze had been through so much.

He sniffed back the lump in his throat, and scratched at the rough-spun folds of Baze’s clothes.

“Tell me—tell me what this _thing_ is that you’re wearing. It’s horrible.”

Baze huffed a laugh, and tried to lean away from Chirrut’s hand. “It’s a prison jumpsuit.”

Chirrut froze, his foggy mind contracting to the single sound of _prison_ , before spiralling out in fractals of understanding.

“Prison?!”

“Orbital facility, past the other side of this rim. Deep space. That’s why—”

“Baze!” Chirrut struggled to push himself further up the bed to lean higher on his pillows. He hoped he looked stern, tried imitating the face Baze had always made when Chirrut wanted to steal loaves from the kitchens. He crossed his arms, but it tugged on his drip, so he settled for shoving at Baze’s shoulder.

“When were you going to tell me?”

Baze shrugged under his hand. “When you asked. I was more concerned about you,” he said, sounding abashed.

Chirrut softened his glaring, but his skin still tightened all over, prickling up in vengeful little clusters that made his hands shake, for whoever had taken Baze from him.

“You didn’t think I’d want to know where you were? What did you do? Are you alright?”

“Chirrut,” said Baze, disbelief dripping from his voice. “I’m fine, compared to you.”

Chirrut cackled despite himself. “That’s not saying much!” Baze kept quiet, and Chirrut trailed off, trying to piece his point together. “So that’s why—why you didn’t—”

Baze’s hand on his face cut him off, and Chirrut hugged his thick arm close to his chest.

“Yes,” Baze whispered. “Yes. Chirrut, I’m so sorry.”

He took a deep breath, and Chirrut strained to catch every word. Baze was better at admitting fault than Chirrut, but only when the consequences affected him and him alone. Otherwise, his guilt turned inwards, and burned at his soul like acid. If this was him expelling poison, Chirrut wanted to catch and dispose of it, before it burned Baze on the outside too.

“I was furious. I took it out on you when I should have throttled every last stormtrooper that destroyed our home.” Baze thumbed hard at the thin skin below Chirrut’s eye, the wispy hairs at his temple. “I only meant to leave for a day or so. To fight, to gather allies and supplies for us.”

Consequence outweighs intent. That is what the Masters had always told him, when Chirrut got into fights, leaping head first into the red haze that descended whenever someone made fun of his accent, or Baze’s ears and puppy fat. Consequence outweighs intent. They wanted Chirrut to think before he jumped, which scraped at the bounds of his understanding. Without instinct, without trusting gut reaction, Chirrut would have died in the slums long before he ever saw a sunset, or heard his name said softly by the only person who had ever loved him.

Over the years he learned to focus on the lesson, and none more so than in his recent years of intending to help, intending to save, intending to give and give to make things right, with the consequences thrown back in his face each and every time.

Baze hadn’t intended to leave him for so long. The consequences were… dire, really. Chirrut let himself really feel it, and it hurt, oh, how it hurt. But—Baze had also intended to come back to him, and the consequence had brought him here, to Chirrut’s side, which was all Chirrut had really wanted. His time in the slums, and then his time in hellish solitude had taught him never to look a gift bantha in its biting mouth.

“You don’t have to believe me. I wouldn’t expect you to,” said Baze. “They caught me within a week. I’d burned my robes, but someone recognised my duan tattoos. Got declared a terrorist and put away without a trial.”

Chirrut hugged Baze’s arm to him tighter, and when Baze’s voice broke as he spoke again, Chirrut’s heart fractured along with it.

“It drove me mad, Chirrut, knowing you were here alone and no way of contacting you. They had to put me in solitary.” Baze bowed his head again, but stained Chirrut’s carved-out stomach with kisses instead of tears. “I thought—I tried to convince myself you wouldn’t want to see me, that you were better off without—”

“Don’t,” Chirrut said hoarsely, “please don’t.”

He threaded his fingers into the spaces between Baze’s where they lay stroking his cheek, kissing the grip-hardened skin between his thumb and index finger. Baze drew in a shuddering breath.

“Some rebel faction came to break their people out, and I hitched a ride. That was—” He broke off, and Chirrut felt the furrowing of brows against his skin. “Just over a cycle ago. Worked my way back doing—jobs. Took longer than I hoped.”

Chirrut let one hand drift to Baze’s jaw, felt the twitch and grind of stress on molars, and decided not to push, for now.

Instead he poked at Baze’s cheek until he felt the beginnings of a smile, and chided, “All that time, and you didn’t think to buy new clothes?”

Baze turned his face back to nestling into Chirrut’s stomach, his grumbling muffled by his thick mane of hair.

Chirrut smirked. “Pardon? Am I deaf as well as blind now?” He pushed Baze’s hair up and away until he found his face.

“I was fucking frantic, okay? I didn’t think about it. It’s comfortable. It’s nondescript. I was saving all the credits I earned anyway, for guns. And for us.”

Chirrut grinned until his hurting gums hurt more. Baze had always been one to gather things he found, little things, and bring them back to Chirrut as if seeking his approval. Chirrut always gave it, not because he saw the point of hoarding acorns or different coloured rocks, but because it made the perfect knot inside his stomach tighten to see Baze happy.

He tilted his head back, enjoying floating in the memories like always. Then he jolted back to waking, startled by a warm, wet kiss to his navel.

Baze. That’s right, Baze was here, and not just a happy shadow in his memory.

“Baze. Baaaaaze,” he said, just enjoying saying it.

He hadn’t allowed himself to do so for so long. It had been too difficult, the noise lodged deep in his throat and gripping with a million hooks shaped _leaving_ , only air rushing past to let him shape the silent name to the sunset long after traditional prayer escaped him.

Baze was really here with him, and happy, Chirrut hoped, mouthing an inaudible trail of words up Chirrut’s stomach to his heart, to whisper, “Yes?”

Chirrut tried to remember, but it eluded him. “I don’t know,” he admitted, pulling Baze up to kiss his forehead. “I love you. You love me, don’t you?”

“Yes,” Baze said immediately, pushing up to press an urgent kiss to Chirrut’s mouth, surprising him. “Force, always. More than anything.”

“I knew it.” Chirrut nodded to himself. “I did it. So, what happened next? When did you reach Jedha?”

“Eight days ago. I looked everywhere for you, but no one would tell me anything.” Baze sounded disgruntled, and sank down to rest his head under Chirrut’s jaw, supporting his own weight so he wouldn’t crush Chirrut any further than he was.

Chirrut smiled down into the crown of his head. “Ah, yes. I’ve been branded much worse than a terrorist in your absence, you know, they probably thought you’d come to collect my head.”

“They were protecting you?”

His sweet Baze. His lamb. “More like, they scented a hot commodity and wanted the payout for themselves,” Chirrut laughed.

The hand on his arm tightened into steel bands, or maybe desperate, last-ditch armour meant to keep him safe. It still wasn’t as tight or shaky as Baze’s voice.

“I could have got you killed. I was starting to think you were—might be—”

Chirrut heaved a sigh, but tempered it by stroking Baze’s downturned mouth with a thumb, tracing the divot of his philtrum. “You’re so _dramatic_ when you’re upset. Not everything is your fault, you know.”

“Might as well be mine. Everything happens for a reason.”

“Oh, be that way then. Force above,” said Chirrut, but he ducked down to smudge a kiss to Baze’s nose regardless. He missed, and got his eye instead, but the consequence was a well-worn, well-loved rumble of approval, so hang the intent.

The beeping had slowed, and Chirrut took the moment’s rest to listen to the world outside. Distant currents of conversation evaporated up to filter into the room, humming and alive. He could hear everything so much clearer, now that the roaring maw of wind wasn’t tearing his ears off where he lay, exposing sensitive, bloodied holes in the side of his head. He could still smell pastry, over fruit.

It meant he could hear clearly when Baze said, very quietly, “You thought I was a bounty hunter too.”

“Mm.” Chirrut knew that if he didn’t nip this morose cloud in the bud, it would take even longer to pull Baze’s story out from under the weight of his guilt. Talking really was tiring. Usually Chirrut carried the bulk of it, with Baze’s wide variety of grunting filling in the gaps, but he was tired, and his kidney was starting to throb. Still, he wouldn’t let Baze trick him into sleeping when he could be wallowing, coating every corner of himself in Baze’s presence.

“Yes, I did think that. But only that you were a very bad one.”

Baze snorted explosively into Chirrut’s collarbone. Chirrut congratulated himself, in his head for once. “I’m a very good one, you mouthy little shit. That’s how I paid for all of this.”

He must have been gesturing to the room, so Chirrut only smiled blandly.

“Oh, uh. It’s two rooms. Here, and a fresher to your right, with an electric stove and a window in this one. We’re in the south district, but it’s on the second floor. Stupid, I should’ve thought—”

Chirrut patted Baze’s cheek. “I keep telling you, it’s only my eyes that don’t work.” He took a quick stock of himself, underneath the gauzy film of pain relief, and hurried to speak before he could give Baze the opportunity to point out his mistake.

“So,” he said, loudly, “you bought these rooms with blood money?” He only meant to tease, but Baze sat up so quickly Chirrut shivered from the draft.

“No, Chirrut, no I didn’t. I—sold my guns. Some other things. Got enough food and medicine to supply half of Jedha, if you want,” he said, with a wry knowing in his voice. Chirrut smiled lazily and pulled him into another long kiss.

They broke apart but Baze kept on leaving dizzying little blooms of heat up Chirrut’s jaw with their beards scratching together, enough for Chirrut’s words to come out strained as he said, “That must have been, ah, quite the—quite the arsenal. Those unfortunate men certainly thought so.” Something from the fight in the alley niggled at the back of his mind, something odd but eye-catching, bright as token glinting at the bottom of a dark well.

“What was the object they wanted so badly? The one you called junk?”

Baze pulled away from the hinge of his jaw to sit back again, and Chirrut touched the scrubbed, sensitive skin with a smile. “I’d almost forgotten about it,” said Baze. “It’s—it _is_ junk, I found it in a Vullard scrapyard. Doesn’t matter anyway, since the bastard Imperials have finally started using the mines.”

“Well? What is it?”

“Hold on, I’ll show you.” Chirrut couldn’t actually see the look Baze shot him after a short pause, but reckoned he could feel it, and shut his mouth on his sniping with a grin.

Baze came back a moment later and pressed a rectangular box into one hand, and a circular, ridged one into his other, slightly smaller.

“The Vullards didn’t know, because they only had the transmitter. But it’s Kerchu made. From Jasindu,” said Baze, letting Chirrut feel out the buttons. Chirrut nodded thoughtfully, trying to remind himself of old culture studies lessons, mostly spent surreptitiously throwing things at Baze.

“Mining, then?”

“Yes. Asteroid mining, if you want to get technical.”

Baze had always been the more mechanically-inclined, between the pair of them, and was forever bringing armfuls of geared and clanking parts back to their dorm in the temple, content to fiddle for hours with things that went together as they were supposed to, unlike people. “For mapping out areas of complete darkness, but it only works in tandem with the amplifier,” Baze said. “S’meant for two people. When I found a broken amp, I did my best. Started wearing it, like it could pick up—” He stuttered to a halt. “It just—reminded me.”

Chirrut looked up slowly, tilting his ear towards Baze, his heart doing somersaults in his chest. So many years later, and Baze was still bringing things home for him like a loth-cat. Broken things, that were supposed to only work together, split apart across the systems. Cobbled back together through love and effort, battered and worn, but whole again. He beamed helplessly at where he hoped Baze’s face was, the strings of the Force bond plucking and singing between them.

Baze coughed, and the warmth of his hand covered Chirrut’s where it was still poking at the dials. “I thought that—if—when I got back, we could look for kyber. I know you never got to finish training…”

 _Kyber._ Like so many other things, it had been so long. So long since Chirrut had last felt the quiet surge of power in the Force, arcing out from every angle and facet of quartz of a raw crystal. Simply by virtue of calling the temple his home for years longer than Chirrut, Baze had always been at least a duan ahead of him. He carved his staff first, achieved the eighth echelon first, earned the weighted power of a single crystal for himself first, and his tattoo. A sigil of the Whills unique to him in ancient Jedhan, a blocky shape containing complex, arcane runes inside. Chirrut had held his hand while it was etched into the nape of Baze’s neck, just at the first knob of vertebrae, and dreamed of his own achievement, his own ceremony.

Like so many other things, it didn’t come to pass.

He realised he was drifting down again when he felt the bones in his hands grind together, and jerked back to the present. Had he been silent long? Baze hadn’t moved, but he loosened his grip hastily when Chirrut blinked his eyes back open.

“Sorry, it was a bad idea.”

“No,” said Chirrut quickly, snatching Baze’s hand back. “No, it’s perfect. I know the High Elders would have hated it, so we have to do it now. When you stop fussing over me, I know a way we can reach the mines from the outside.”

Baze snorted, and took the mining box away from him. A sudden flash of inspiration sparked behind Chirrut’s defunct eyes, and he hoped it wasn’t going to be one of his schemes that made Baze huff and complain the whole time, even as he helped.

“Baze… the machine, you said it’s for asteroids, yes? Total darkness?”

“Yes, or places where the rockdust is volatile to light. Why?”

“Well, I’m no technical genius—”

Baze barked a low laugh, and Chirrut glared at nothing. “Be quiet, that was an indirect compliment you just wasted. Anyway, it sounds to me that it works like echolocation. Like a sandbat, out in the rockfields.”

“That’s the idea, yeah. What’re you plotting?”

“Well, even sandbats don’t fly around in _total_ darkness, at least not all the time. Unlike certain individuals…?” Baze stayed quiet, and Chirrut deflated. “Me. I mean me. Was I being too subtle?”

That startled a real, full-throated bout of guffawing from Baze, but he settled down again when Chirrut frowned impatiently. “Chirrut, I’ve taken punches in the face that were more subtle than you. I was just thinking.”

“So you could do it?”

“I think so. All it needs is a mod for the inducer coil, to widen the range for outdoor spaces. Amp works just the same though.”

“Excellent!” Chirrut clapped a little wildly, pleased with himself. There had been a lot fewer people around to provide him with praise, of late, but Baze had always more than made up for it, even if it was mostly grumbled, and long-suffering, to hide the fondness. “Now I’ll never let you out of my sight, _hah._ You can be the north point on my compass. The key for my map. The— ”

“No, that doesn’t work,” Baze said dryly.

“Oh? Why not? Do you know something I don’t, Baze Malbus?”

“Last I checked, hell is outside and it’s already pretty frozen, so anything’s possible.” Baze returned from putting the parts away somewhere to sit back down beside the bedroll, and when Chirrut reached out blindly, he found soft cotton over hot skin in place of scratchy canvas, and hummed his approval. “It doesn’t work, because I’m the one that follows you, remember? You’re the north point.”

Chirrut feigned a swoon. “Ahh, the sweet talker returns. You’ll melt hell and hearts both yet, my dear one. Regardless, it’s a wonderful, practical gift, just like you.”

Baze quirked a small smile under Chirrut’s hands, his face hot like sun-warmed sand when Chirrut pushed his cheeks together, cooing.

“Stop,” he said gruffly, batting Chirrut away, rerouting insistent hands down the back of his collar instead. “It _was_ supposed to be a gift, actually.”

Chirrut buried his face in Baze’s neck, inhaling the salt and heady foliage smell of him, mumbling, “What’s the occasion? Besides coming home to me, and saving my life, of course.”

“It was foolish, I had just hoped—but I was still too far away, so I missed the actual date.” Chirrut waited for him to sort the right words in his head, happily teething at Baze’s jaw. “I wanted you to have it for our birthday.”

“Oh,” Chirrut said softly. Then, “When’s our birthday? Has it passed?”

“Yes, about two months ago. I spent it in the hold of a cargo ship transporting acklay, thinking about you. Acklay can smell true despair, you know. Makes them angry, but I could’ve killed every one of the fuckers that day.” Chirrut snuffled a laugh into the new dampness in Baze’s collar, and felt Baze grin into his temple, lay a kiss there like a promise to his exhausted mind.

“Baze,” he said, “how old are we?”

A fine tremor ran through Baze, but his voice was strong and steady like the temple oak when he spoke. “Twenty-five, Chirrut. We’re twenty-five. Still young. It’s not—it’s not too late.”

Chirrut nodded, his head weighing heavily against the bridge of Baze’s collarbone. “Twenty-five. When? Today?”

The susurrus of Baze’s deep breath in his broad chest reminded Chirrut more of Jedha’s shifting sand dunes, than of the hardstone cliff that it had once been. Still strong, still powerful and able to cause damage, but capable of change and adaptation. Huge and endless. Soft and giving way to the raging of a northwest wind in dirty robes. Chirrut smiled.

“Yes, it can be today if you want,” Baze choked out. “Start our new life with something good.” Words echoing through time.

Chirrut smiled wider. Baze had given him his new start once before, and what were birthdays for, if not continuing tradition? The Force was eternal. Baze was his beginning. Baze would be his end.

“Happy birthday, Baze,” he said.

“Happy birthday, Chirrut.”

Baze tilted him back to hold his face in both hands, brushing his nose along Chirrut’s eyebrow. Chirrut swayed drunkenly forward to meet him again, sweeping his tongue inside to lap up the warmth, the goodness.

They lay exchanging languid kisses for long, intoxicating minutes, until Baze drew back with a wet noise and a little pant. Chirrut grinned and licked his lips to chase the taste of bao and caf, still so close that he brushed Baze’s too, and snickered when Baze groaned into the corner of his mouth.

Unusually, it was Baze who ruined the moment, by tugging gently on Chirrut’s wispy, dishevelled beard.

“Ugh, don’t,” he complained, ducking his chin down and away. “I want you to shave the damn thing off as soon as possible.”

“Of course,” Baze said, amused. “I was going to do it when you were asleep, but I wasn’t sure if you’d let me. Or want me to. But I know you don’t like them.”

“True. See, you were sure! Have faith, baobei, you know more than you think. You know everything.” Chirrut smiled fondly, reaching out to pat around for Baze’s face until he found his beard. “And yet…”

The heat from Baze’s face could have seared the skin from the pads of his fingers. “It makes me look intimidating,” Baze mumbled. He took Chirrut’s hand, and fiddled with his fingers. “I’ll get rid of it.”

Something quivered inside Chirrut, a firework igniting, then shot abruptly up and out from behind his tonsils in an unchecked peal of manic laughter, so loud he almost missed the thump of Baze falling back from his crouch and onto his ass. He threw his arms over his face to muffle the uproar, but some burbling slipped through the cracks like little darting fish. Unimpressed waves were rippling through the Force, so he made some attempt at stifling himself.

“Don’t—don’t you dare,” he wheezed. “If you’re to be my protector you have to look _intimidating_.”

He cackled again when Baze harrumphed. “Love, it’s just—you have the gentlest face I know. Stars, the matrons used to call you sunflower!” He flopped over onto his side, still laughing.

“Well, I’m bigger now!” Baze shot back, but a smile was curling round his voice like a summer vine.

Chirrut settled down, more breathless from his outburst than he would admit to Baze.

“No,” he said firmly, “don’t shave it. I only dislike them on myself. They make my mouth look odd, but of course, there was no one around to look well for. Plus, a blind man and a razor aren’t a good match, and I was loathe to do any more of the Hutt’s job for them. So.” He waved a hand towards his face, then trailed it through the bristles above Baze’s mouth. “Beards can be very handsome. Just look at you.”

Baze snorted softly. “You never said so, before.”

Chirrut tugged him down again, and Baze came unresisting. Their foreheads kissed together, and Chirrut said, “Because I knew how you worried enough about your ears already, and I never wanted you to think I found you anything but beautiful.”

Chirrut had been paying some attention to the room, and the summer sun’s fiery eye had long since closed on their south facing window. The heat flooding over his face was purely Baze.

“You’re beautiful, Baze,” he whispered.

“I’m not,” said Baze thickly. “I have—scars.”

“Show me,” Chirrut demanded.

Slowly, shaking, Baze cupped Chirrut’s hand and brought his fingers to a hooked line of twisted flesh below his left eye, following the broad curve of his cheekbone, once stained by Chirrut’s blood. Chirrut felt along it, gentle as a breeze, and nodded.

“Just a scratch,” he declared.

“Well—there are _more_ ,” Baze spluttered, sounding caught off guard and far too indignant for someone wholly regretful of their violent badges of honour. “And not all scars are skin deep,” he continued, gravely.

Chirrut rolled his eyes and stretched, blissfully grounded and feeling whole under Baze’s weight. “Well,” he sniffed, “if you think scars are unattractive I have bad news for you.”

Baze’s hand halted in the middle of stroking Chirrut’s hair against the grain. “That’s not what I meant.”

Hesitantly, he reached down their bodies to the blanket’s edge. Chirrut tilted his legs wider in silent answer, and Baze lifted the cover to expose his bare thigh, like the most precious, fossilised vein of kyber deep underground.

Chirrut held his breath as little sparks drifted up his spine from Baze’s trailing fingers, embers wafting skywards from a low-banked fire. The jagged branch of scar tissue was numb some days, tight and sensitive to even the brush of his robes on others. Today was a sensitive day, even with the bacta drip, and he shivered under Baze’s big, caring hands. Built to farm, to cradle younglings in the wake of nightmares, to wield weapons like a war god.

“It’s all my fault,” Baze whispered sadly. “All of it.”

He bent to brush his lips along the scar’s entire length, and Chirrut let him. He would work for his entire life to ease the world from Baze’s shoulders, but for now, for today, he’d let him grieve and pay his penance his own way. Still, Chirrut laid a hand on the arm draped across his hips, until he felt Baze turn his head to look. Chirrut shook his head. He closed his eyes and kept silently denying, long enough to hear Baze chuff a laugh and press a last, open kiss to the scar.

“So much has changed,” Baze said, once he had slumped to sit against the wall by Chirrut’s pillow.

Chirrut heard the rustle of the jumpsuit, the scratch of the zip, felt the great living presence in the Force, as one does next to a monumental tree, or perhaps the raging ocean. Chirrut had never seen an ocean, but in that moment, he thought it must feel like the swelling power he felt in Baze.

“Show me,” he said simply.

“What?”

“Show me what’s changed. About you, between us both. It’s getting dark anyway, just—”

“How do you know—?”

“—just, take that awful thing off and come to bed. Please, Baze. I want—” Chirrut breathed, to calm the starburn yearning in his heart. “I want to see you.”

Baze didn’t sigh, didn’t grumble or complain, he didn’t even snort. He stood, and Chirrut heard the shucking noise of clothes being kicked away. Chirrut smiled up at the darkness, his mouth bowed under the weight of loving. Baze, once so fastidious with his machines and his ordered temple life. Chirrut would have to talk to him later about the new and many dangers of a tripping hazard.

Silently, Baze peeled the tangled linen back and shuffled in beside him. The bedroll was big enough for two people, but Chirrut curled into him immediately, crowding forward to put his hands anywhere and everywhere he could. Baze lay down placidly with a contented sigh, keeping one hand anchored hot to Chirrut’s jutting knife of hipbone, and Chirrut looked.

Baze was—

Baze—

_Oh._

Before, when they had been kissing with blankets between them, Chirrut had attributed much of the bulk to Baze’s baggy jumpsuit. Even when he had rolled down the top half, it hadn’t really registered.

“You’re—”

Before then, before the fall, Baze had always been bigger than him, yes, but in the way that childish padding stretches into lanky height during adolescence. Baze had always been strong, but it manifested itself quietly, just like the boy it belonged to. It was completely unlike the cut topography of Chirrut’s body, hewn from a childhood of barely scraping by, then a decade coiling his limbs around _zama-shiwo_ forms. Plus, NiJedhans from below the equator had a tendency towards being wiry in the first place.

Chirrut hadn’t even felt below Baze’s _shoulders_ yet.

“Gods,” he said, “Baze, you’re... bigger.”

“I told you I was. Not much to do in prison except make yourself less of a target,” Baze explained, matter-of-factly. “Then the guns weighed a lot, I suppose.”

Chirrut swallowed, his head pounding with all he had missed—no. All he had to re-learn. What a glorious opportunity. Baze was broad as the desert horizon, and for the first time in years Chirrut didn’t feel a sick tug of mourning when he thought of the felled oak. Jedha had a new one to replace it.

Smooth skin covered thick ridges of muscle between Baze’s neck and shoulders, and Chirrut dragged his faintly trembling hands down to really feel the arm presented to him. He cupped the bicep with both hands as Baze flexed for him, and let out a low, embarrassing noise without meaning to at the feel of it, too strong to be tempered in its growth by flashy muscle definition, jolting a laugh from Baze.

“I can’t believe this is what it takes for you to lose your tongue.” He palmed at Chirrut’s hurting cheek, as if he were the blind one needing to reassure himself of his lover’s presence. Chirrut turned his head to mouth at the meat of Baze’s thumb, and kept exploring.

The heft of a forearm, twined with veins, sturdy from hauling weapons and heavy cargo across the stars. Chirrut ducked his head a moment to collect himself, to mutter to the Force his usual mantra. The Force was with him, here in Baze’s power. He would be one with the Force, deeply and often if Baze would indulge him. Baze always indulged him.

“Alright there?”

“Yes, hush please. I’m concentrating.”

He was, in fact, concentrating. It was hard to reconcile the image left burned into his broken eyes, the sight of Baze’s body and soul leaving him with thousands of memories of a shape he knew better than his own. Hard to reconcile with this new touch-map of a brawny, fully grown man.

Chirrut slid a hand almost apprehensively down Baze’s chest. It was just as he feared; thick here too, the planes of pectorals and latissimi convex with brute strength and laced with scars. He fingered at the soft hair in the steep valley of Baze’s sternum, slightly damp with sweat and the heat of their bodies close together. He wanted to kiss Baze there. He wanted to kiss Baze—

He ventured lower still, and gasped. Baze’s midriff was enough to send his head spinning off into orbit around one thought: _I wish I wasn’t blind. Give it back to me for just a moment, just for this._

But it didn’t serve either of them now to be maudlin. He groped around at Baze’s solid sides, lacking definition here too, but with an unmistakable iron hardness under the softly giving layer of fat. Chirrut felt quite overwhelmed.

“Did you eat nothing but falumpaset steak while you were gone?” he croaked. “Good grief.”

Baze chortled, and pulled at Chirrut to lie until they faced each other, half-covering him with his own naked body. Not before Chirrut had protested, though, by leaving sloppy kisses all the way back up. Chirrut thought about using his hand to feel the way, but decided better of it, pushing his face forward to see if Baze’s grin matched his own. He found what he wanted and kissed Baze short and hard, once, then twice, then—froze.

Baze was holding him close, with an arm banding around his dead branch shoulders to stroke lovingly at the craggy outline of Chirrut’s backbone. He flinched away from the touch, when really he was shying from thought of Baze touching the places on his body where the hunger had tried to burst out of his skin, to gnaw at the air with his bones. He didn’t want Baze to get bitten by any more guilt, or by Chirrut’s failures.

Baze did not retreat this time, though. He only crushed Chirrut to him, and that alone was enough to set his bruised heart leaping, because—Baze had always been the one who never underestimated him. He knew what Chirrut wanted. He knew what Chirrut could take.

Chirrut clung to Baze’s front, trying to meld them together through sheer will. Or prayer. Sometimes he found it hard to tell the difference.

“How do I look, then?”

Baze drew back, his hands fitting the grooves of Chirrut’s ribs. “Terrible,” he said frankly. He gave a helpless laugh at Chirrut’s scowl, steeped in affection. “Wonderful. You look like you, which is the most beautiful thing, to me anyway. Your smile is the same. Your eyes are the same.”

“Now I know you’re lying,” Chirrut scoffed, even as he melted at the thought of all the times Baze had said nothing at all, instead of giving people compliments he didn’t mean.

“You know I wouldn’t, not about this. It’s still you in there. So beautiful, and, ah. Strong-willed.”

Chirrut grinned. “That sounds like ‘stubborn’ to me. You’re lucky I believe you. So what colour are they then, my eyes? Are they ugly?”

Baze hugged him tighter, left kisses on his eyelids. “No, not at all. They’re blue, actually. Like… like the glow-worms in the deeper caves, do you remember?”

Glinting constellations underground. When they lay on the earth-cool rock, holding hands, it had felt like floating through a nebula. “Yes!” Chirrut cried triumphantly. “Something I do remember, thank the Force. Hmm. It’s likely bleaching of the retinas. I must stare at the sun too much.”

Baze was untangling Chirrut’s drip line from his braids. Their bare legs and feet were shifting against one another, and Chirrut’s whole body thrummed with building desperation, just to climb inside of Baze for once and seek his shelter. In his hazy understanding, they had been talking for hours. Or was it days? He had been talking to Baze for years, he had never stopped, but he hadn’t been able to touch him until today. He found that he ever wanted to stop. It had been so long.

“We should switch sides—”

“I missed you,” he blurted. “So much.”

Baze dropped the line, and Chirrut felt the warmth of breath on his face before the first shaky, grasping touch to his paper-thin stomach.

“Chirrut,” said Baze, low and urgent. “I—I—damn it!”

He surged forward, until Chirrut could feel himself covered, the smell and feel and heat from Baze all around him, and a groan dragged itself from deep in his core to spread out across Baze’s shoulder like scalding honey. Baze was pressing his mouth to Chirrut’s throat and trying to talk at the same time.

“I’m never letting you go, never out of my _sight,_ do you hear me? I was empty without you, I look like this because I needed to make space for all the fucking _hurt_ —”

Chirrut choked on a sob, everything bubbling up to spill out of his body in waves of desperation, all the years, all the days he would have rather pulled his own insides out than have them coated in more layers of viscous, needling regret.

“Touch me,” he ordered Baze, but his yanking hands quickly turned to begging when Baze sat up and gentled his own, petting and running his fingers lightly through the maze of wires on Chirrut’s chest. Chirrut cocked his head, and when he heard the shrieking protests of the heart monitor he loosed a growl from between his teeth, one that drew dark shutters over his ears, left him in the darkness of an angry beast denied its meal.

“Baze,” he snapped, “turn it off.” Baze just sat there unmoving, hunkered over Chirrut’s good leg, and Chirrut’s hands flew to clutch at the sheet that had pooled around their heaving stomachs. “ _Please,_ Baze.”

Baze fussed at the pillows for a moment, but his voice was dragged through broken glass when he spoke, and Chirrut could feel the burgeoning erection pressed into his thigh. “Chirrut, you’re… your heart. You’re too sick for this, still.”

Chirrut’s threw his hands up from where they had been urging at the smooth, full handed grip of Baze’s hips. “Then go slowly!”

Baze was wavering, Chirrut could feel it in the catch and drag of the hands on his chest, blunt nails leaving streaks of want, and it sent a shocking burn of molten heat down his spine. Baze seemed to make a decision, retract it, and then commit himself again, leaning down to prop himself over Chirrut on an elbow, stroking at his hair.

Once, Chirrut would have considered cheating, saying something like _what if I died tomorrow,_ but when Baze lowered himself until their bellies touched in a raw silk glide, he caught the Force and sailed himself to a better, less selfish state of mind.

Instead, he opted for a sweet, “Thank you,” and captured Baze’s snort with his mouth. He bit hungrily at Baze’s bottom lip, licked inside to swallow down his tongue, but his own mouth fell open helplessly wide to drink in Baze’s low, rumbling moan. So deep, so earth-shaking, rattling his ribs to pieces—

“Your voice,” he gasped against Baze’s aching kisses, “I missed your _voice_ , in my ear when we do this—”

Baze moved quickly to his neck, freeing Chirrut’s mouth to plead and praise as he saw fit, rocking the controlled power of his whole body into his tongue’s movements. Each sucking bruise Baze left on Chirrut’s skin flamed through him, until he felt like a piece of parchment held over a dozen different candles. Baze reached for his thigh with shaking hands, the scarred one, and hitched it up around his hip where he knelt between Chirrut’s straining legs.

Chirrut pressed his head back to the pillows, panting at the scrape of Baze’s callouses on the back of his knee, the thick width of the torso caging him in.

Suddenly Baze was lifting off his chest, but just as Chirrut began to whine and clutch and skid his fingers over the bump of Baze’s nipple, the blaring beeps silenced. Every little popping release of a suction cup from his chest caught a breath in his throat, a shiver through his pelvis.

“Fucking annoying,” Baze muttered breathlessly, pulling the last one free.

Chirrut closed his eyes against the headspin, and smirked up at Baze’s shifting presence in the Force. “What about my heart, Doctor Malbus?”

Baze finished whatever he was doing to the machine beside the bed, and lowered himself down to swipe sopping, careless kisses over his breastbone. “If anything changes, I’m in the right place,” Baze growled, and went crawling back to his spot in the hollow of Chirrut’s collarbones.

Baze was pressing quite noticeably into the crease of Chirrut’s hip, and he tried to concentrate through the hot pressure at his neck, misting out to fill their cocoon of blankets. Something wasn’t—

He caught the sound of words moaned into the soft space under his jaw, Baze whispering, “My Chirrut, my—mine,” not desperately, but in syrup-slow murmurs that draped the humid air around them like curtains of flowering plants. Chirrut opened his mouth, to bite, to kiss, to lick, to tell Baze again and again with every roll of their hips how much he loved him, but a thick lock of hair fell into his mouth instead.

“Force,” he spat, along with hanks of wet braids as Baze laughed into his shoulder.

“Blindness hasn’t improved your coordination during sex at all, then.”

“You should take it as a _compliment,”_ Chirrut chided, “I was forever telling you how good you were. I think you’re getting big headed, angling for praise like this.”

Baze didn’t reply, because he was busy licking broad trails further towards Chirrut’s underarms, so Chirrut let him go. He sagged, his limbs heavy and aching, his bones filled with the same lust-addled pounding as his head. But still—still something—

He stiffened. Traced uncertain fingers across the dips and valleys of Baze’s strong back, wondering what to do.

Baze seemed to have noticed too that something wasn’t right, but his kisses took a while to grind to a gentle halt, as if easing Chirrut down instead of himself. It had just been so deliciously distracting, gaining back the familiar tight fit of Baze’s thick shaft against his own, between their hips. It had felt so _good,_ that he hadn’t noticed the lack of reaction from his own body.

“Chirrut,” Baze said, soft and panting. “We can stop, if—”

“No—no I don’t—there’s nothing I want less right now than to _stop,_ kriffing hell.” The humiliating prickle of tears only angered him further, and he scrubbed violently at them before they had a chance to fall.

Still though, a frustrated, wet little hiccup slipped free and he covered his face. Baze was quiet, and just kept pressing closed-mouth kisses to Chirrut’s shaking shoulder, even when he thumped his fist against the mattress with a muffled shout.

Baze’s own erection was flagging by the time either of them spoke again. The brush of it, the knowledge that Baze was here on top of him, still kissing, still wanting him, was enough to send a weak clench through the taut gap between the peaks of Chirrut’s hipbones, but still he lay there, flaccid.

Baze cleared his throat and asked him, calmly, “Has that happened before?”

Chirrut dropped his hands to glare down at Baze, hoping his blue eyes contained lightning. “If that’s your way of asking if I was unfaithful, you can—”

“No! For kriff’s sake Chirrut, I meant whenever you did it yourself.”

He tensed, ready to hurl back a reflexive _no_ , but then he thought. Of course, it had never happened before the fall, when he and Baze would tumble into storerooms sometimes thrice a day with their robes already half-undone, to make it last longer when night came. But after… he cast his mind back through the static, like watching a jumping, glitching holo.

It hadn’t been important. There was no room for the need, when the need for food and water and _Baze_ had been so crushing. “I haven’t. I haven’t touched it, I think. Not in a long time, maybe years, I—”

Baze cupped his face, gently smoothed away the upset crease between his eyes.  “Shh, lovely. It’s the malnutrition. You’re not well, we shouldn’t have started in the first place.”

Chirrut only shrugged jerkily. “First my leg, then my kidney. My heart, my eyes, and now my _cock_ doesn’t work either, I just—” He drew a shuddering breath. Looked to the Force. The bond drifted peacefully between them, twitching in places with every stroke of Baze’s hands, and a calm that was slowly becoming familiar settled over him. “I just wanted to be close to you, like that.”

The big, rough hand pressed to his lower stomach was a delicious counterpoint to the sweet kiss to his temple, like salted meat paired with fresh fruit. “We are close,” Baze hushed. His hand smoothed lower until it cupped Chirrut’s soft length, just holding him. “It wouldn’t matter to me if we didn’t ever, so long as we’re always this close.”

“Well, it matters to _me,”_ Chirrut said waspishly. Was there nothing Baze would covet for himself? Did he not want to _take_ Chirrut, the way Chirrut wanted him? “We are Guardians, not Jedi, I wouldn’t inflict celibacy upon you.”

“‘Inflict,’ he says”, Baze snorted. “And you’re forgetting, I’m not a Guardian any longer.”

“You’re my guardian, aren’t you?” Chirrut countered. “Even more reason for you to do as I say.”

Baze was laughing silently into Chirrut’s hair, his voice wobbling when he managed to speak. “As always, your logic would twist even the most enlightened elders of the Whills into knots. Go on then, what are your orders?”

Chirrut turned his head to kiss, not caring which part of Baze he found. He considered the situation while he scrubbed his mouth raw on Baze’s bristly chin. The bustling conversation of the street below their window had ebbed, made way for the nocturnal whine of insects, the distant rumble of larger cargo ships. His arm felt cool, and light, as if the needle in his hand was pulling him down into a peaceful pool of drifting consciousness. No. No, this was important. What was it?

“Do you know,” he said imperiously, “what the seedier roots of the temple grapevine used to gossip about you? What they called you, when you hoisted whole boxes of kyber, and ploughed the tough vegetable patches every year?”

Baze was still fondling gently at Chirrut’s groin, and hummed a vague questioning noise into his ear.

“ _Virile._ Such a strong, handsome boy, that Malbus, so quiet, so intelligent, so _virile—”_

“Stop,” Baze grunted. Chirrut darted his hand out to find the burning shell of one outstanding ear. “I bet you started it anyway. Because you were the only one who enjoyed the benefits of my _virility.”_

“Exactly my point!”

The firm swell of Baze’s dick was nudging at Chirrut’s side, draped over one another as they were, perhaps excited again by the shapes and sight of Chirrut mouthing off about its prowess. Baze heaved a sigh, and muttered something about getting the dosage right tomorrow, but his hand didn’t stop touching Chirrut’s sac like something precious. Chirrut went boneless, the hairs on his arms and the back of his neck standing up. “Fine. All you need is to recover your strength, but Force knows I can’t win an argument with you, even when you’re only half lucid. _Especially_ then. What do you want of me?”

Chirrut frowned. He was perfectly lucid. “I want… I want to feel you take your pleasure from this. From us together.” Baze’s hand had stilled between Chirrut’s legs, so he pressed the advantage. “I want to feel you come against me, I need—I need _your_ need for me.”

To his dismay, Chirrut was choking up again, the sudden scope of how important this was, becoming lodged in his throat in its journey from his heart to his mouth. He pulled Baze closer until he felt the rapid pounding caged inside a broad chest, and spoke into Baze’s mouth, desperate and low.

“Don’t resist this for my sake, you’d be doing me an insult. Take enough for the both of us, come enough for the both of us. If you feel anything like I do then show me, mark it on me, take back what’s _yours_ _—_ ”

Baze’s hand on his hip spasmed and he swore harshly, hauling Chirrut closer until their groins pressed together as deep as their mouths.

“I thought of you—always, with my hand, nothing like yours—” Baze panted between filthy kisses. “Mmh… sometimes with my fingers inside, pretending they were inside you, but there’s nothing like you in the universe—”

Chirrut whined into the kiss, and licked the salty taste on their faces into Baze’s mouth; tears or sweat, it was theirs regardless. He scraped his teeth gently along Baze’s bottom lip, his hands clenching into rhythmic fists against the shifting muscles of Baze’s back.

“I won’t be a martyr for sex too, Baze,” he breathed, scratching at the nape of Baze’s neck, over the hidden duan tattoo.

Baze squeezed his sharp hip and kissed across his face until his forehead, giving a shuddery laugh. His cock was already spreading sticky trails onto Chirrut’s stomach, and Chirrut was blazingly certain that if he’d been in better health, he’d have gone off at least twice already.

“No, I suppose I should have suspected that,” Baze said wryly. He sat up and pulled Chirrut’s lower body into his kneeling lap, spreading his sluggish legs with an ease that shot more fruitless, pulsing heat around the base of Chirrut’s spine. He was almost incredulous, that his body was refusing to cooperate in the face of all this.

Chirrut reached for him immediately, drawing Baze down by the hair to prop his head on Chirrut’s chest. A thick arm wound round to grip Chirrut’s leg and he moaned at the feel of Baze’s upper arm, almost as wide as his scarred thigh. His stomach trembled under the assault of kiss after biting kiss when Baze finally took himself in hand. Chirrut waved around until he caught Baze’s bunching forearm with a gasp, the muscles shifting in time with the slick noises coming from between their bodies. He could almost purr from the satisfaction, so tight and potent that it drew yet more tears.

So many years, and the Force had provided, brought them back to fit together as they always had, always should, always would. Baze was hot and solid and real between his thighs, and the static that had hung around the room since waking, confusing him and causing doubt, resolved to show their outlines to him clearly, sprawled together tight.

“You’re here, you’re here, I have you,” he chanted through the catching in his throat. He groped around to feel the colossal clenching and release of Baze’s back muscles on one side, flitted down to rub circles in his sweat-slick thighs.

“Show me what I do to you,” Chirrut said, and cried out needily at his hips being jolted forward in a thrust cut short. Baze stifled a wail around one of Chirrut’s nipples as his hand sped up, his knuckles brushing Chirrut’s softness with every stroke.

Chirrut squirmed, pinned in place by Baze’s weight pushing him down into the bedcovers. His chest was burning alive under the twin attention of Baze’s beard and mouth, scrubbing and soothing in sync with his racing heart. He reached for Baze’s flushed-hot face with a broad smile.

Baze’s voice had been famed throughout the temple, since the break in his sixteenth cycle it had been deeper than the great gong, and far more effective at corralling rowdy young initiates.

“Let me hear you, love, beloved—”

People in the market had jumped and turned their heads when Chirrut coaxed a real laugh out from Baze, broad and dusky just like him. Chirrut heard the fluttering sighs of mooning admirers when Baze had taken leading chant duty during evening prayers.

He begged, “I can’t see you, don’t deny me this—”

“C-can’t you feel it?” Baze rasped, exasperated pleasure thick through his voice. “We have neighbours.”

But Baze had never really been able to deny him anything, and Chirrut had already loosened the stone that held the dam in place. The groan that rumbled through him as he twined their hands together, raked through Baze’s tousled hair, it shook him down to his curling toes.

“That’s it, that’s it, that’s mine,” be babbled, gripping Baze tight about the hips with his knees. It was still so frustrating, such a last cruel punishment to his already punished body, that he might miss out on spilling his own love onto Baze’s skin for this, their first night back together. “It goes right through me, when your cock fills me up so far and your voice sinks down my throat to meet it—right through me—splits me open—”

Baze gripped his hand tight enough to hurt as he moaned, long and broken and deep as a canyon out in the desert. His hips bucked forward as he came hard on Chirrut’s belly, his soft length, the movement somehow still so tender that Chirrut laughed even through his overwhelmed tears. Baze slumped heavily, and Chirrut held him close.

“Was that good for you, too?” he said after a moment, and was rewarded with a choking laugh.

“It’s never anything but,” mumbled Baze, sounding wrung out and exhausted.

They calmed their breathing together for a while, almost meditative. Baze’s panting slowed down with every stroke across his neck and shoulders, his broad and lovely face that Chirrut never tired of touching. His hands chased Baze’s face as he stirred and made to move up and off from squashing Chirrut flat, so he grabbed quickly at Baze’s ears.

“Where are you going?”

“Just to fetch a washcloth,” Baze said around a yawn. He grunted in surprise when Chirrut yanked him down again, still by the ears.

“Don’t. Please leave it there, so I can feel it in the morning, and know I wasn’t dreaming again.”

“Oh… Chirrut.”

Big hands cupped his face, and Chirrut leaned up automatically for the kiss that followed. “I’ll be here in the morning. I’ll remind you.”

But Chirrut wasn’t fooled. He was feeling very tired, though, his throat dry and scratching from all the talking and exertion and crying. “I told you, sometimes you were there, in the mornings. Those hurt more.” Baze sighed and kissed him again, more slowly.

“Alright. I think the water’s all used up in the fresher anyway, thanks to the kriffing rationing. When we go to the mines for your kyber, I think I’ll bring some disruptor chargers for their damn machines.”

Chirrut grinned. Baze shifted onto his side next to Chirrut, and faced him, pulling the blanket back around them. Chirrut heard the click of him swallowing, and waited, as he always would.

“I will not leave you. In the morning, I mean. Never again,” Baze whispered. He cradled the back of Chirrut’s head to bring their foreheads together, and Chirrut made a decision. Sly excitement welled up within him, a sunstorm arcing through his faded limbs to give them strength, fuelled by deep, deep love, and sharp longing for what they had just shared.

“I know a way to hold you to that promise,” he said gleefully, and pressed a little kiss to the bridge of Baze’s nose. He began.

The words were of the Whills, he had heard them many times growing up in the temple, but some of the more important phrases were in the complicated higher tongue he had never got around to learning. Instead, he replaced them with his own, the smoother, wider southern vowels curling round their names. He knew Baze would recognise the rhythm instantly, because he had told Chirrut of them first, in the leafy garden, sun dappling their youthful blushes. Chirrut came to the right point and waited, his voice strident and defiant to the way Baze’s hand had clenched into a vice.

He raised his eyebrows when there was a pause. “Well?”

Baze cleared his throat, but emotion still clogged up his voice as he stuttered, “Y-yes.”

“Good,” said Chirrut. “Me too.” He barrelled forward to crush his mouth to Baze’s, tilting immediately so their lips and tongues could slide together better, deeper, again and again. The slight ache in his jaw paled into nothingness in the face of Baze’s whimpering laughter, barely able to kiss back.

“There now,” Chirrut said smugly, when they finally broke apart. “I’ll admit I had a secret second motive.”

Baze snorted, but his hands told a different story, sweeping adoringly over every inch of Chirrut’s torso, cupping his jaw, touching his swollen mouth with reverence. “Oh, aside from simply loving me, you mean? I should’ve known.”

Chirrut smirked. “Yes, aside from loving you to the depths of space and back. You’re my husband now. You’ll have to consummate me soon, or it will be null and void. I might not marry you again.”

Baze choked. “Consummate you?” he managed, his voice equal parts disbelieving and amused, which was normal for them.

“Yes! I can’t very well consummate you, now can I? Not in my condition,” said Chirrut.

Baze huffed, but it was the best kind, the happy, loving one. Chirrut spared a quick thanks to the Force for allowing him to know Baze so well before their separation, that he could read him like a holopad, even without eyes. “We’ll consummate when you can walk straight, how’s that sound?”

Chirrut pretended to think it over, then nodded. “Fine. When I can walk straight, and then we won't stop until I can’t walk straight again.”

Baze groaned. “You’re going to be the worst patient on this moon,” he complained, and Chirrut laughed, wild and happy and floating on a sea of pain meds, regained love, and the sound of the soft southwest wind against their home.

 

~

 

Chirrut still had nightmares sometimes, of waking up on jagged rocks without his tongue, without his lungs, gasping for air and unable to call for Baze’s help. Baze held him when he woke them up, let Chirrut jabber half-mad pleas, let Chirrut lick him all over to reassure himself. Took him back to the caves to find his very own kyber crystal for the end of his staff, one that sang to him sweeter than the quavering vibrations from NaJedha’s rings. And if they destroyed some Imperial hyperdrills in the process, well, that was another good memory of the place to layer over the old and rotten.

Baze still carried his guilt around like a boulder strapped to his back. It weighed him down, like so much had done before, the serious boy Chirrut knew would have died for his temple. The boy who made Chirrut’s initial happiness his to shoulder that first time, and now did every day the sun rose. Chirrut found him crying sometimes, silent and still, like when he had awoken and crawled from the empty bed to find Baze cross legged, mending Chirrut’s tattered robes, his face wet. Chirrut wore the robes, more patched and cobbled from different parts than they had been, but he wore them proudly. He wore the echo box they rigged between them, because he knew these gifts were Baze’s way of shedding some of the guilt.

They still argued, sometimes. About the different ways they still paid penance, and clung to their stubborn ways of dealing with the hurt. About Chirrut giving too much of himself and about Baze straining to catch and carry the parts Chirrut dropped. But it was good. They learned to compromise.

Chirrut still prayed to the west, up on their flat rooftop, but not until his hands and forehead bled. Not until his throat clawed up behind his eyes in search of water. He prayed with a thick blanket around his shoulders to ward off the northwest monster, with Baze’s big hand underneath and splayed across the scar upon his lower back. Later he would pray to Baze’s body, with Baze’s hand upon the scar across his thigh.

The old sun brings no heat.

But there was heat and breath and love in their life.

In life there was the Force, and the Force was eternal. And so, Chirrut reasoned, were they.

**Author's Note:**

> Wew lads, it's over! I hope you enjoyed it.
> 
> I know even less about eyes and eye surgery than I do about the Star Wars universe. And with that, who wants to play "spot the Ratchet and Clank references"


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